Selecting Literature Texts for Kenyan High Schools, 1940 to 1998

An examination of the numbers, scope, and genres selected for Kenya’s English and literature high-school syllabi between 1940 and 1998 reveals four types of excluded literature: the 1950-1960 guerilla war for land and freedom; punitive/pacification expeditions; settler- and travel-literature, and orature. The gaps about the people’s resistance to imperialism were partly inspired by Kenyatta’s leitmotif to “forget the past”, which perpetuated the Mau Mau myth and triggered a state-inspired national amnesia about Kenya’s ignored—but not forgotten—independent war heroes. Abetted by pervasive lies, distortions, and omissions, this amnesia permeates Kenya’s media, public fora, and educational system.

The dissertation contextualizes and documents Kenya’s historiography and nationalism expounded by Kenyatta’s government in “development” policies and educational goals. Evidence was gathered through conversations, interviews, and library research and includes orature, personal narratives, fiction, nonfiction, magazines, journals, teachers’ manuals, high-school syllabi, national exams, education and development plans and reports, government officials’ statements and speeches, administrative notes, reports, laws, and state acts. Accessing official documents—even lists of suggested texts or circulars convening meetings to select texts—was often complicated since many documents were “classified” as secret.

The criteria for selecting texts were often haphazard and partisan, seemingly corresponding to the ideological and political exigencies of neo-colonial Kenya’s largely corrupt ruling elite and its imagination of the nation. For instance, a necessarily anonymous high-level educational officer revealed the existence of a 1980s secret committee—supervised by the Criminal Investigations Department and answerable directly to President—that vetted the final list of suggested texts.

Evidence about Kenya’s high-school English and literature syllabi reveals three patterns: the genres studied were reduced slightly, the number of selected books and texts shrank significantly, and controversial topics were avoided or sanitized. Like the nation, the literature curriculum suffers historical amnesia and social, cultural, and political myopia. Moreover, the insipid recycling of texts decade after decade ignores much new material and many authors. Politically skewed, the pattern of selecting literary texts thus prompts questions about Kenya’s goals for education and their grave epistemological, political, and national implications.