Boarding schools were started by British protestant missionaries.
The story of parental responsibility came from American evangelical missionaries.
To say that parents take kids to boarding schools to avoid responsibility is historical confusion.
I explained here that British missionaries started boarding schools to create an African elite by drawing them away from their communities.
The boarding schools persisted after 1963 because African elites wanted to maintain that system of privilege. threadreaderapp.com/thread/1003241…
So when Kenyan parents take kids to boarding school, it's because they think, as the BRITISH missionaries did, that being at home interferes with learning.
Also, space and resources for local facilities like schools, libraries and recreation spaces for kids have been grabbed.
When there are no local schools for kids to walk to, then you put kids in a bus at 5am, or send them to boarding school.
This is a not a problem of parental responsibility at the home but parental responsibility in the political arena. We vote as tribal bots and not as parents.
Now, this story of parents not taking responsibility began as a political and moral propaganda from the US through the evangelical church.
Politically, the narrative was a backlash against the gains black Americans had made with the civil rights movement.
To prevent white kids from going to de-segregated schools with black kids, and to weaken black communities, the US government wanted to defund black communities but explain that their poverty was the fault of black communities themselves.
That is when the narrative of parental responsibility, absent black fathers and dysfunctional black families came up. Those narratives run till today.
But that's America. How did these racist narratives become popular in Kenya?
The evangelical-charasmatic churches of the 90s. In Nairobi, they preached these narratives to my generation because we were starting families and World Bank has forced GoK to defund social services.
So because my generation could not take their kids to the public schools we had gone to, the evangelical narrative was very convenient. We were told "anyway, it's you, not GoK, who is responsible for raising your kids. Don't ask about schools, ask about homeschooling."
And this narrative of parental responsibility came as a complete package. It covered sex, marriage, education. It was basically a Christian theology of neoliberalism and privatization.
So here is the toxic mess you Kenyans are not getting when you repeat what you hear in the church and the media.
Boarding schools are for the super rich. "Parental responsibility" is a narrative to blame you Kenyans when you can't access schools which the rich kids go to.
And just in case you think that what happens at Peponi or Durham doesn't affect you, remember that the kids who graduate from those schools will be employed in government to make decisions, in the name of being more "qualified" than your kids.
If you don't live in a house as big as Joan's in Runda, don't think that "parental responsibility" story is about others who are not as moral as you. You are a fool. The elites are insulting you and you're here laughing with them at yourselves.
"Parental responsibility" is you being called washenzi whose kids don't deserve schools and other social amenities. But instead of demanding those services, you say "washenzi ni wengine, si mimi." And your taxes give their kids jobs and give the elites tax breaks.
The only thing keeping the GoK in power is ignorance of Kenyans. And I don't mean the ignorance Jomo was talking about. Jomo was using the racist idea that Africans are ignorant because they don't know Western civilization.
I'm talking about ignorance as a war on consciousness.
Even the most vocal of voices, who were supposedly Gen Z, do not have political consciousness. They think that the right bureaucrats in the government will make Kenya work. Almost all the doctors who led #lipakamatender less than 10 years ago are now trying to make SHA work.
It's a complete failure of political philosophy that makes Kenyans think that GoK's problem is merit of the personnel. The majority of educated Kenyans think that way. And after school, they stop reading, so they sincerely think they are the messiahs whose skills will save Kenya.
We have no opposition because Kenya's democracy is elitist. Kenya's "democracy" is code for elites controlling the masses. Elections are for recalibrating the elite. They block us from fighting on issues. They fight each other and force us to watch and take (ethnic) sides.
The recalibration of the elite through elections is for giving ordinary Kenyans that they have the power to choose their leaders. But once the vote is cast, the recalibration begins. Lawyers in European wigs make fancy arguments in court, media looks active reporting numbers,
pastors pray for peace, private sector lectures us on going back to work, embassies endorse the vote, and Kenyans start following the appointments and sending congratulations. For the next 4 1/2 years, the elite keep circulating positions, making more appointments.
I'm convinced that Kenya is sustained by Western money. We can't have an extremely insipid, corrupt elite, an anti-intellectual academy, a non productive economy, and the economy hasn't crashed. There is an outside factor sustaining this Kenyan economy, but not on our behalf.
Our lives are becoming more incoherent and more chaotic, but the institutions are still standing instead of collapsing. Then the Kenyan journalists and international media sustain the image of a coherent intelligentsia who can explain Kenya with the right theories and data.
Kenya's chaos must be being contained with foreign money. That's why no matter what we shout about the mess, GoK ignores us.
Kenya is one big collective cognitive dissonance. The world can see it, but we, who suffer it, can't.
By the way, we haven't talked about how CBC is giving your government data on your children. For years. I tried to flag those "assessments" as a form of spying, but you people said you preferred that to exams.
I know we hated literature in school (it's badly taught and very badly examined, anyway) but to understand the psyops happening here, we need to understand the difference between the symbolic and the literal, and why they matter. 🧵
Symbolic language is language that is able to capture what is said beyond the literal words. So, for example, if we say Zakayo must go, that's a shortened form of talking about our political problems and bad leadership.
Without that short form, every time you speak, you would start from scratch...Governance, elections, corruption etc before arrivimg at Must Go.
2nd benefit of the symbolic form is solidarity. Whether I'm talking about education, you about abductions, we land at the same point.
Like I said yesterday, I have outgrown caring what government does and what bills it writes. GoK is a parasite. Nothing it does is meant to help Kenyans. Everything is for containing Kenyans. The Creative Economy support bill is no different.
First thing to understand: GoK operates on "doctrine of discovery." You know the way wazungu told us they were the first to see Lake Victoria? That's how GoK operates, even with the arts. It fights the arts, then Kenyans struggle with the arts anyway, then GoK declares
it's establishing an infrastructure for the industry. But the industry was already there, despite being fought by GoK.
It's the same thing they did with Jua Kali. They told people "rudi mashambani," then ILO came and told them "look at fundis doing something new. How cute."