Thread by @wmnjoya

Imagine you're a British civil servant in the colonial government.

When you were a child, you were plucked you from the house and sent to boarding school. Your humanity was bullied and beaten the s**t out of you. You did an exam and we're admitted to Oxford.

Oxford! Where Lords and princes go to school. You learned to eat with the right fork and knife, how to sip afternoon tea.

After you graduated, you were sent to the colony to promote the British Empire among savages who eat with their hands.

You've been told that your job is to build infrastructure so that resources can be shipped to London. You have to send reports of progress to London. And European settlers are lynching the savages and demanding laws that force the savages to work on the land Europeans grabbed.

And then the Africans are always fighting back.

You are short staffed.

What do you do?

You hire natives. They're cheaper, and they'll pacify their tribes.

But they need to speak English and to read and write to help you. So you allow missionaries to start schools.

But the missionaries have a problem. The Africans don't want their kids to get the European religion. So how do you get Africans to go to school?

You exempt them from hut tax and forced labor. You allow them to grow coffee and buy cars.

Then word spreads among the village: wale wameenda shule wanapata kazi za wazungu.

That is how employment got associated with schooling. For the British, schooling was about staff for empire. In the African minds, it "employment" and an easier life.

The only people who complained that schools didn't train in skills for work were the European settlers. It makes sense. They are the ones who needed forced labor, but which African was going to willingly do it? And now going to school exempted an African from forced labor.

Employment through school was the view of the "savages." From the view of government, they were not giving people jobs. They were training staff to extend empire. To steal from their own people, kill their own people, so as to pay themselves and pass on the loot to Britain.

The best example of this is the Ministry of Tourism. They are protecting Europeans who settle in northern Kenya as they destroy the pastoralist livelihoods. That's what "employment" is for.

But sixty years after "independence," the elites have now acquired enough theives from the fruit of their groins. The chiefs who were collaborators had many wives and hundreds of children. Now their grandchildren are in power. There are enough relatives for them to staff GoK.

Elite kids go to Peponi, then do their degree at Amherst, then they return to rule.

So the elites no longer need ordinary Kenyans to go to school. They have enough offspring in the top posts.

But here we are, celebrating the shutting down of education using the same complaints as the European settlers who grabbed our land.

#wajingasisi
theelephant.info/ideas/2020/06/…