Thread by @wmnjoya

I started this journey into the heart of Kenya's colonial darkness 12 years ago as a naive mindukras kid who wanted to help build the nation. I was excited about what I had learned: Fanon, Lumumba, Sankara, Ousmane Sembene...and I was looking forward to sharing it with students.

I could not imagine what I ran into. Obstacle after obstacle. People saying they wanted knowledge but not allowing people to learn it. I was still naive. I thought I was the problem.

So I started doing research to understand.

That was how I learned about neoliberalism that began with the structural adjustment progams. I learned that as early as the 1980s, the US and UK decided to create an Anglo-Saxon monopoly of university education by gutting down universities worldwide through "quality assurance."

The basic logic was that every "lower" universities would have to "benchmark" themselves against the luxurious universities like Oxbridge and Harvard. And that the people campaigning for this hated the arts and humanities everywhere else but in UK and US prestigious universities.

When I found this out, I tried to share it with Kenyans and especially academics. Again, I was surprised. Most couldn't understand what I was saying - even fellow academics. Others chose not to know. So I asked: why is there this mind blockage?

Another thing I noticed was that the mind blockage used the same vocabulary of white supremacy alot.

Around that time, @m_ogada and Errant Natives eg @VMatiru were talking about racism in conservation. I had finally found company.

Shortly after, I stumbled on @racecapitalism and work by scholars like Michael C Dawson and Robin D G Kelley.

And then it all came together. The reason I couldn't be heard in Kenya was because capitalism and its anti-human, anti-education project were necessarily racist.

So I asked: kwani our academic foreparents didn't know what was cooking? I went back to Kenyan history, searching for what historians and Kenyan academics of the 60s and 70s said about what they were seeing?

Shock. Here are two books that just made my jaw drop.

It was from this book by Bruce Berman that I found out that the colonial administration was brainwashed in the metropole and didn't know what it was doing. The violence of colonialism was partly for that reason. amazon.com/Control-Crisis…

The other book was by a Kenyan. I will not share it for now (although if you're really keen, you'll see I've mentioned it elsewhere). But more than one book on Kenyan history explains how colonial education was structured as a class project. Here's one. search.proquest.com/openview/77c22…

So ending up with the picture of the first president at a funeral which, logically, he should not have attended, now answers my questions. Twelve years of work ending in a photo. It shouldn't have had to be. But now I know.

It's up to Kenyans to now continue THIS journey (not the Jubilee one). I got the answer I was looking for, and it took 12 years. I want to say thank you to #KOT because your questions, conversations, links and even insults (the insults revealed the blockage) helped me grow.

And of course, I've also grappled with my own implication in this sordid story. But I did this research knowing that I am not innocent. And anyway, innocence is yet another Euro-centric narrative that is based on the idea of purity, that is necessarily white.

The story of innocence is what makes us mindukras not want to dig too deep into history, in case we see that we're also implicated. But I learned from the work of Lewis Gordon that in dirty system, we're all implicated. The question is the extent of our responsibility.

That is why I talk alot about tragedy. In tragedy, all have sinned, but the greatest guilt is placed on the most powerful. So when these ruling elite fight for more power, they are stupid because they prove that they must suffer for our social redemption. pambazuka.org/governance/any…

And that day will come. The universe doesn't forget.

So in the meantime, we have so many stories to tell. So much pain to heal. So many victories to celebrate. But institutions - media, schools, government, church - have blocked them.

I pray you will make those stories heard, and that you will keep sharing them.

God bless Kenyans (minus the ruling elite). You're all amazing.