Wandia Njoya

Wandia Njoya is a Kenyan scholar, educator, public intellectual, writer, and social commentator. She is an Associate Professor of French and African Literature at Daystar University, Kenya. Her scholarship focuses on African literature, decolonization, education, democracy, Pan-Africanism, language, and public policy. She is widely known for her critiques of Kenya's education system and her advocacy for the humanities, critical thinking, and African-centered education. She regularly publishes essays on her official website and has contributed chapters and academic articles on education, literature, and African thought. Quotes When I was your age, I was an education student at Kenyatta University. One semester, our history of education professor gave us an assignment, which was to write a term paper on the impact of different government commissions on Kenyan education. I took the assignment seriously. I read a number of books on the topic. I even typed and printed my paper, which was a big deal, because there were very few computers available for students. However, I was fortunate to have a father with a computer that looked like a huge carton. So to type my assignment, I had to go home. I then printed the work and even paid to have it bound. One of my classmates looked at all my effort and laughed. She said to me: what’s the point of putting all this effort into the assignment? I’m just going to copy someone else’s work, and I will still get an A. A month or so later, our term papers were returned. Guess what I got. An A. And guess what my friend got. An A. You can imagine how bad I felt. The next time I was home, I lamented to my family: What’s the point of doing honest work, if you are going to score the same as someone who doesn’t put in the work? My younger sister then told me: don’t regret the work you put into the term paper. It doesn’t matter that your friend scored the same grade as you. Eventually, you will be better off for doing your own work. That was advice from someone your age. To her older sister, who was me. After I completed my degree, I was posted to Matuga Girls in Kwale district, where I was earned 3,000 shillings a month and shared a house with two of my colleagues. As for my friend, she chose not to teach and she got a corporate job. A year later, she invited us to a harambee to raise money for her to take a Masters in the US. About six years later, I did go to study in the US, coincidentally at the same university my friend was admitted to. But I didn’t need to call a harambee, because I got funding for my education based on the experience I had gained in Kenya. I eventually completed my studies. She did not. As for my sister’s words, they did come true. I still remember that term paper. It was through that paper that I learned about the Phelps-Stokes commission of 1924. And just in case you don’t know why that matters, let me tell you. After slavery ended in the US in 1865, the country’s black population faced a huge problem. Because they had been slaves, they were uneducated and had no property or skills. Yet they were expected to now compete in employment or in entrepreneurship with the rest of America. So the major question facing the leaders was this: how do we educate our people to be self-reliant? One major idea came from a man called Booker T. Washington. He said: why don’t we just train black people in technical skills from which they can earn a living? We don’t need to be equal to whites; we just need to work and take care of ourselves. Booker T. was simply being practical and offering a short term solution. But that’s not what whites understood. What they heard to say was that racial equality was impossible, and that the only education black people deserved was technical skills; not skills in the humanities or the arts. Why does this matter? Well, in the 1920s, the British were trying to entrench colonialism in Kenya and needed Africans with skills that could build the colonial economy. So inevitably, they had to answer the same question: what kind of education should Africans receive? And because they were not sure, they were offered help from the US, by guess who? A man called Thomas Jesse Jones. Jones was the CEO of a donor foundation called Phelp-Stokes Fund. The fund had supported Booker T.’s ideas about education in the US, so in 1924, Jones shared Booker T.’s education model with the British colonial government. The Phelps-Stokes Commission proposed that Africans should be taught technical subjects, especially carpentry, metalwork and hygiene. Although Africans were to be taught to integrate their knowledge with African culture, they were not to be taught African history or African art, because according to the colonialists, Africans had no history or art worth studying. And settlers, like the Delamere family, also did not want Africans to receive education in the arts and humanities, because, they said, the arts would corrupt our minds and make us start asking for unnecessary things like freedom. External links Wandia Biography Category:Living people Category:Academics Category:Educators Category:Writers Category:Literary critics Category:Pan-Africanists