Kisumu Boys question, Ole Kulet and Mwalimu's education crisis

In my insatiable eagerness to share with you, the mid-week crisis is an almost routine experience. I keep toying with handfuls of ideas, news, events and personalities and wishing to chat with you about as many of them as possible.

Before I know what I want to focus on, the midweek is on me, and the publisher’s unrelenting deadline is blinking red in my face. The joys of the scribbler!

Anyway, so was it this week. First came, or rather went, Henry Ole Kulet, a fine, devoted and committed writer, whom I never really got to know except through his writings.

Somehow, I feel he was the kind of writer I would have liked to emulate, telling my stories well and sincerely and letting the readers enjoy them with minimal fanfare and self-advertisement on my part. Henry Ole Kulet, you lived, you loved, you told your tales and told them well. Fare thee well.

From our author, my thoughts leapt to Sheikh Seif Sharif Hamad, who also departed this world on Wednesday, three weeks after it was publicly announced that he had contracted the Covid-19 virus. Popularly known as “Maalim” Seif, this veteran politician was the Vice-President of Zanzibar. All of the departed elder’s names inspire honour and respect. “Seif” is sword, suggesting a fighter for the faith, and “sharif” implies traceable descent from the Prophet’s kin.

Maalim Seif

We could say more about the fallen leader, except for the known agreement between you and me that I do not write much about politicians. Suffice it to say, however, that in Uswahilini, the term “Maalim” (Mwalimu) is not taken lightly. My hope is that Maalim Seif’s sad but dignified exit should remind all of us, especially the few in many parts of East Africa, that Covid-19 is real and it kills.

I understand that Maalim Seif, who was my agemate, died in an isolation ward at Muhimbili Hospital in Dar es Salaam, where I, too, spent several weeks in 1965, battling the smallpox virus.

This brings me down to Kisumu Boys High School and my own mwalimu experiences. My thoughts were pulled up to a shabby halt when I read the headline, “Kisumu Boys to Go”. Well, well, how go, go where, why go, when go, and anyway, go? Please excuse the bad English. This, I suppose, is what happens when you are rudely shaken out of what you thought was a cosy corner of this fitful world.

I was recently in Kisumu, revelling in all its beauties, its eccentricities and, above all, in my deeply treasured memories of it. No one mentioned to me the City and County Parents’ well-thought-out plans of comprehensively redesigning it, and especially, removing Kisumu Boys and Kisumu Girls from their current sites. Maybe my hosts, friends and colleagues assumed that I knew.

Now I know I should learn how to moderate my enthusiasm for hosting spaces. Otherwise, it is quite possible, and maybe not always convenient, to be mistaken for a mwenyeji (local dweller).

But in the case of the Kisumu Schools, many of us have justifiable reasons for claiming belonging there. We may not have studied or taught there. But we have visited, we have performed, we have brought our children and other relatives to study there. Kisumu Boys ni kwetu.

Beloved landmarks

I confess and declare that this is not an opinion piece, let alone a well-considered suggestion of what should happen to the two beloved landmarks of Kisumu City. Indeed, strangely, one of my most poignant memories of Kisumu Boys dates back to my Directorship of the KU Centre for Creative and Performing Arts.

We were to perform at the School, and Dr Maurice Amateshe, then in his brilliant literature, drama and music undergraduate career, was to perform a few classical vocals and also the leading role of Hlestakov in Gogol’s Government Inspector.

The trouble was that, following a series of vigorous shows in Nakuru and Kakamega, Amateshe’s voice was seriously “rebelling”. We spent our first few hours in Kisumu on a search for honey and such other remedies for our star performer.

My hope and trust, like that of all who care, is that whatever happens will be for the best of our schools and for our City and County. What I share here is merely the spontaneous overflow of the emotions that have been assailing me, and probably you, about our education system ever since the coronavirus struck.

Coming from a mwalimu, and a garrulous conversationalist like me, my silence about matters educational has been “deafening”. The simple and honest truth is that I did not, and I still do not, know what to say.

Clash of interests

 To speak of a clash of interests in this one little person of parent, grandparent, teacher of teachers, course developer, textbook writer and “public intellectual”, as my former students insist on calling me, is a simplification. The reality is that it is a chaos of interests.

This, indeed, is symptomatic of this coronavirus pandemic. We simply have very few reference points to guide us towards tried and tested courses of action. Hardly anyone in our generation, or that before us, can, remember, for example, Kisumu Boys being closed continuously for as long as it was in 2020. What happens after such an experience?

What is the new normal after an abnormal and unprecedented tsunami? Bold people, like CS Prof George Magoha, Governor Prof Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o and the Kisumu leaders have to make bold decisions and take drastic action, and they are doing so.

But the bottom line in a delicate and all-embracing matter like education is, I suppose, that there can be no definitive bottom line. We try out what appears to be the best course of action in the circumstances, but with the readiness and open-mindedness to consider alternatives as warranted by our lived experiences.

Flexibility and adaptability have always been hallmarks of our survival and evolution. They should perhaps be the core value of our education. Thank you, Kisumu Boys, for arousing my sentiments. I will be visiting again, soon.

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