It’s time we audited school literature text books

By Mahat Issack Hassan  

School Literature menu should be balanced and all inclusive.  This is the thesis of  Abenea Ndago’s article ‘Study books relevant but lack Kenyan face’ in The Standard On Saturday  December 8.  Yet Kenya’s school literature diet has all along been monotonous and boring. 

To school authorities, Kenyan literature (Kenyan face) started and ended with Ngugi Wa Thiong’o.  Indeed I get the impression that this trend was deliberately perpetuated by the Ministry of Education and the Kenya Institute of Education.

Boardroom arrangements

 These authorities owe us an explanation.  Do they select the school literature texts in the same way they select students who join national schools?  Is there a boardroom arrangement in which the only consideration is to make a particular writer an instant millionaire? Of course making the authors of the selected texts instant millionaires is not an objective of the authorities and should never be.  But the irony is that the selected texts create this impression.  The selected texts should be above board as the school set books are important in nation building considering their role in molding young minds into responsible Kenyan citizens who pay allegiance to the Kenyan nation and massacre ethnicity at the altar of the nation.

The tragic outcome of the trend was felt in two ways: One, our schools produced graduates whose literary visibilities were reduced to Mount Kenya and the surrounding Mugumo trees such that a mention of Naquib Mahfouz whose Half a Day is the title story in the anthology, Half a Day and Other Short Stories and was studied in our schools and who is a literature Nobel Lauret like Witi Ihimaera will not arouse any interest.

 The Nobel laureate status is a feat Ngugi is yet to achieve.  Yet Ngugi is all over the map in Kenyan schools.  The trend extends to our universities where a quick research on all the literature monographs written in the last ten years reveals unnecessary fascination with Ngugi.  Is it that there is a prescriptive approach in our literature departments or there is a shortage of lecturers to supervise such literature theses that ‘travel the road less taken’?

Bias authorities

The school authorities’ bias towards Ngugi has indeed eclipsed fellow Kenyan writers like Meja Mwangi, HR ole Kulet, Yusuf Dawood, and Moraa Gitaa.  What, for example, makes Ngugi’s The River Between suitable as a school text and Ole Kulet’s Moran No More unsuitable?  Moran No More has a similar setting, similar themes and structure with The River Between yet this text was bypassed several years as I remember teaching it in Nairobi School and Starehe Boys’ Centre.

The other two kindred writers who were elevated by the school authorities are Majorie Oludhe Macgoye and the late Francis Imbuga.  These writers whose texts were studied as set books are taken to represent the Kenyan nation.  Other than being authored by Kenyans, what makes these works representative of the Kenyan culture?  Kenya is not a homogeneous nation.  We are a rainbow nation.

Ngugi is heavily inspired by the Kikuyu culture and Majorie Oludhe Macgoye by her adopted Luo culture. Both writers have characters from other Kenyan ethnic groups who are heavily stereotyped and depicted negatively in their works.

Labeled racists

Some apologists’ critics may jump with a response that writers cannot be labeled racists for incorporating racist characters in their fiction. 

They conveniently suspend Edward Said’s contention in ‘Orientalism’ that ‘Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the orient because the Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness.’  

Ngugi and Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s fictional works are full of characters representative of ‘other Kenyans’ that are depicted negatively because ‘their Orient’s difference was elided with their weakness’.

Other than the white characters, there are Maasais who are considered ‘the enemy’ and Somalis who do not wear under wears.  The characters that attract negative characterisation are too many to be sampled in this article.

 But the fact is some of these set texts will require a major revision if they are to appeal to an honest judge as representative of Kenyan literature that helps in building an all inclusive and cohesive nation.

When Tom Odhiambo demanded ‘Time we had ethnic literature in Kenya,’ I responded, ‘Yes, We have Kenyan Literature.’  Tom Odhiambo was right after all.  We have ethnic literature.

Hassan is an editor with the Jomo Kenyatta Foundation.