Clamouring for Education: the struggle in Colonial Kenya
The struggle continues - the struggle today
In his book Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon writes about how, as a black man, intellectual deficiency and racial defects were ascribed to him by society. “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (Fanon, 1967, p. 184). Decades later in the twenty first century, people of African descent are often still viewed as being intellectually inferior. Amin (2010) writes about the persistence of racism, how old racisms of the past - what he calls ‘racial debris’ - are just below the surface ready to resurface when it appears they have disappeared. “Even the most discredited concepts of race seem to return albeit in different guises” (Amin, 2010, p. 2).
In 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published their controversial book, The Bell Curve, which revived ideas reminiscent of the eugenics movements’ preoccupation with mental deficiency in the 1930’s. The authors suggest that there is a genetic link between race and intelligence and state that African Americans have lower IQs than whites. However, several studies have shown that there is more variation in intelligence within groups than between groups in a way that race cannot be a determining factor in intelligence
“Black Africans in the United Kingdom are now the most highly educated members of British society. …..Even if African-born blacks who immigrate to the U.K. tend to be an elite group who often go to the U.K. seeking education, the census results from Britain make life very difficult indeed for the supporters of The Bell Curve thesis that cognitive inferiority is hard-wired into the brains of black people” Source: Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, Autumn 1996, 13, 33-34. Retrieved from: http://www.aracorporation.org/files/14._africans_most_educated.pdf
In writing about the similarities between the past and the present, Collins (2003) describes how race, class and gender interlock on the modern college campus in ways similar to how they interlocked on the plantation. “Is your campus a modern plantation” (Collins, 2003, p. 337) she asks. "Are elite white men over represented among the upper administrators and trustees controlling your university's finances..........Do africans-Americans, Hispanics or other people of color form the majority of the invisible workers who feed you, wash your dishes, and clean up your offices and libraries after everyone else has gone home?" (Collins, 2003, p. 337)
Creese (2007) cites statistics that show how despite the educational advantage the increasing numbers of racialized immigrant men and women enjoy in Canada, they are experiencing a growing disadvantage in the labour market which is structured hierarchically by race. She writes about how educational credentials are valued differently depending upon the race and gender of the person to whom they belong – racialized immigrant credentials and work experience are largely dismissed. Such de-skilling of highly professional racialized immigrants, she argues, transforms them into Canada’s source of cheap, menial labour. This she argues can be reconciled by principles of ‘democratic racism’ which she defines as “the ability to hold to democratic ideals of equality while engaging in forms of racial exclusion” (Creese, 2007, p. 211).
The history of education in colonial Kenya is repeated in present day North America in the sense that education for racialized people remains underfunded and the construction of intellectually deficiency in racialized peoples – a construction intended to confine racialized peoples to menial jobs - is not viewed as a construction but has been normalized into a fact where it serves the same purpose. This absolves society of the need to look outside these populations for institutional and systemic causes. When Africans’ ‘uneducability’ was provided as justification for underfunding African education, colonized Africans pointed to institutional failings and opened independent schools to address these systemic failures. There may be large gaps of silence where suppressed histories, hidden politics and unconscious assumptions reside, and these can interfere with provision of education as well as students’ response to it
The history of education in colonial Kenya is repeated in past and present day North America where education for racialized people remains underfunded and assumptions of intellectual inferiority persist and continually resurface even after it appears that discourses of inferiority have been laid to rest. In the present day, it is not only the poorly educated that are confined to menial jobs. In Canada, though there are success stories, the growing numbers of professional, educated, highly skilled racialized immigrants are in effect ‘de-educated’ by not having their education credentials recognized once they arrive in Canada. They then end up at the bottom of the job market’s racial hierarchy where they perform Canada’s menial jobs
Collins, P. (2003). Towards a New Vision. In Privilege. Westview Press.
Creese, G. (2007). Racializing Work/Reproducing White Privilege. In Work in Tumultuous Times: Critical Perspectives. McGill-Queens University Press
