Thread by @wmnjoya

Yesterday I shared how technical education was British working class education colonialists promoted using Phelps Stokes commission as PR. Phelps Stokes, led by Thomas Jesse Jones, championed technical education for blacks, with Booker T Washington as the black leader.

THREAD

The British colonialists wanted Phelps Stokes for two reasons:

1) They thought US would be considered a "neutral" player

2) they knew Kenyans would listen to blacks like Booker T and Dr. Aggrey more than to colonialists.

Before the Phelps Stokes arrived in 1924 to promote technical education, the colonial project was backfiring because Africans were refusing to provide their labor. And the racist settlers were pressurizing the colonial government to do something.

Already, by 1914, Mekatilili had led the Giriama in successfully running the British out of town. Giriama men would hide when the British would come to recruit soldiers, and the Giriama refused to work for the British to pay taxes.

Instead, they traded with Arabs and Indians and used that to pay taxes. They outwitted the British and the British got mad.

So the British burned their kayas to break them down. And Mekatilili got mad. She led a revolt.

I've heard that she publicly slapped a colonial DO when he tried to imposed forced laborand that's when she was banished to Busia.

But she returned!

The Giriama burned down British installations and that was it for their project there.

A similar revolt happened in Ukambani which I shall tweet about later. The chiefs swore their men against working for the British.

So by 1920, the British were a little, let's say, sensitive. The colony was becoming expensive and Africans were refusing to be "employed."

Worse, the British had just finished fighting WWI to make their billionaires rich. So the colony was broke. And Africans who served were now more articulate in calling out the British bullshit.

By mid 1920s, trouble was brewing.

The colonialists were asking for more taxes and the settlers were cutting wages by 1/3.

The missionaries, in their liberal hypocrisy, organized Kikuyu chiefs to come to an agreement with colonialists on how to make colonialism less painful. The NGO was called Kikuyu Association.

One member of that association was Harry Thuku. He was a civil servant in Nairobi, so he was exposed to all communities. He distanced himself from the accommodationist politics of KCA (I was surprised about that missionary angle), and decided to form the East Africa Association.

Thuku angered the British by not sticking to his tribe (KCA) and seeking collaboration outside the Kikuyu. His East African Association declared that as far as Africans were concerned, they would collaborate with Indians in fighting for economic equality.

By 1921, Harry Thuku also knew that technical education was up to no good. He had heard of about Tuskegee in the US and mistakenly thought that Booker T and Dubois thought the same. So he wrote this letter to Tuskegee Institute asking both of them for help. He didn't get a reply.

By January 1922, there was talk of a proper revolt against the lower wages, lack of land and higher taxes. The British got scared, and in March 1922, they arrested Thuku.

And that was the scene of another famous woman of Kenyan history, Mary Nyanjiru.

Nyanjiru refused the requests by the accommodationists to disperse, that Thuku would be released shortly. That was when she uttered the famous statement asking the men to hand over their trousers if they were going to accept that explanation.

(Incidently, few people make the connection between Nyanjiru's statement and what the mothers of political prisoners did in Uhuru Park 70 or so years later.)

Nyanjiru was one of the 21 people who died on March 16, 1922 when the colonial police fired on the crowd.

Harry Thuku was exiled to Kismayu for 10 years, essentially breaking the momentum for a pan-African, global movement for independence.

But the story is more complex than that. I haven't yet read about his position on the Mau Mau, which he apparently didn't support.

Maybe another Kenyan can look that up.

But my suspicion, and this has been hinted in what I've read, is that Thuku's vision was of educated Africans taking over from the British. So his vision wasn't unaffected by British ideas.

But remember this is 1920s, and the opportunity to understand such nuances was actively prevented by the British. And the reason the British were imposing technical education was to stem the rising pan-African and global consciousness among the people they were educating to rule.

Gideon Mutiso talks of two types of Asomi who emerged in Kenya. There were the asomi who were willing to collaborate with the British, and there were those who were ambitious and said they wanted to take over from the British. It appears Thuku falls in the second group.

Mutiso also argues that collaborator asomi were the ones who were allowed to stay in power, while the ambitious ones were punished throughout colonialism: exile, murder, election rigging (yes). The collaborator asomi populated the Kenya civil service at independence.

This meant that at independence, there was a division between the civil service and the political representatives. Civil servants were arrogant snobs because they were more educated than the people's representatives who were fighting while civil servants were going to school.

Shikuku, Seroney, Mulwa and other MPs often complained about this madharau for the people's representatives. But the collaborationist asomi like the first two presidents kept saying that what matters is "law and order."

https://twitter.com/wmnjoya/status/1223353229809016832?s=20

This is one of the pillars of the autocracy we have in Kenya. Nic Cheeseman and Daniel Branch call it the "bureaucratic executive state," where the president rules by using the civil service to either crush or compromise politicians. @Fromagehomme researchgate.net/publication/24…

The former members of the "2nd liberation" whom you now see supporting thieves are the members of the ambitious asomi. They want power but still on the elitist terms of privileging the educated.

The ambitious are making the mistake that people like Thuku made, of not supporting grassroot struggle, thinking they can ignore local people and lobby international players like the US and UK embassies to support elite agreements like BBI.

That is why they are quiet about TVET. They don't mind the consciousness of regular Kenyans being exploited. In the 1920s, Thuku could oppose TVET because in those days, it was obvious that all Africans, including asomi, were "n----rs."

Remember Malcolm X's famous question about what white people call a black person with a PhD.

But today, all the "n----rs" in Kenya are all of us who haven't been born to traditional chiefs. The 0.1%.

And yes, you could argue that someone like me would be the Thuku of 1920 or the handshakers of 2019 (it's been 100 years, wah!)

Siyo kujitetee, but I've been arguing for something more radical: the end to this class division through education.

I've been calling for:

1. divorcing employment from schooling
2. diversifying learning opportunities and certification
3. More support for arts, libraries and cultural centers, basically, decentering the school as the only source of skills and certification.

4. Making public learning institutions truly public, where people can walk in, learn without needing certificates or grades.
5. Ending exams and implementing life-long learning not just in word, but also in deed.
6. Reforming the economy, ending the use of land-based wealth.

We need to replace inheritance with work as the creation of wealth.
7. Use of public resources to provide social services, so that people don't worry about healthcare and education (which would change anyway).

TVET and degrees being equal is not only a lie, but it's distraction.

African Americans tried equalization with Brown vs Board of education in the 1950s, when they won the case at US supreme court arguing that seperate but equal education is nothing but seperate and unequal.

But now American education is back to racial segregation by another name.

We too must not ask for equalization of TVET and degrees. Already, Magoha was saying that TVET grads can join universities after TVET. Isn't that already an admission of inequality?

We need a radically different structure of education AND EMPLOYMENT!!!!!!.

As African Americans said about education, seperate but equal is nothing but seperate and unequal.

END