Thanksgiving for King Richard and his home-schooled girls

Do you remember the mnemonic device our teachers used to teach us the colours of the rainbow? “Richard of York gave battle in vain,” it ran. The first letter of each word represented a colour, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

But who was Richard of York? Richard was a mediaeval English King in a period of great rivalries within British royalty, especially between the “Red Rose” faction of Lancaster and the “White Rose” one of York. The Richard of the quote, was Richard the Third, and as his title indicates, he originated from York, my first city of residence in Britain in the 1960s.

Richard was a fierce and feared warrior, but he turned out to be a very bad and murderous King. His evil life and reign are immortalised in Shakespeare’s historical tragedy, Richard the Third. Many ignorant and uneducated people think that Literature is all about reading and quoting Shakespeare, but that is not true, as I pointed out in my Makerere valedictory lecture in 2014.

Literature is really about educating and civilising (“deshenzinising”) our feelings and relationships, and expressing ourselves clearly and convincingly. This is communicating with facility and felicity. To “deshenzinise”, as you remember from Mwalimu’s dictionary, is to take the “shenzi” out of our thoughts and behaviour.

That said, however, there is nothing wrong with knowing and quoting the best practitioners of literary skills, whether those are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Shakespeare, Chinua Achebe or Said Ahmed Mohamed. Their works are good models of civilised feelings and competent communication. These items should never be missing from a competence-based curriculum.

We will be talking a little more about education presently. But back to King Richard, I am glad to tell you that our King today has nothing to do with the nasty fifteenth century British monarch and the battles that did not save him from being overthrown and a violent death. Our King Richard is a living American legend, whose remarkable exploits have been made into a heart-warming feature movie of that name.

King Richard, the movie, dramatizes the lives and careers of Mr Richard Williams and his daughters, Venus and Serena, as they systematically work their way up through the challenges of African American deprivation to indisputable international recognition. Calling them royalty is no exaggeration, in view of their professional, material and social success. I have written about the Williamses before, but I thought there was something new to share about them, from this creative retelling of their story.

Let me get two little things out of the way. First, I will not talk much about tennis, which I love and which has made the Williamses famous. Secondly, I am not really a movie enthusiast. So, I must tell you about the special beauties that got me talking about this one.

Among the attractions that got me looking forward to this film, which was released yesterday, to run into the week leading up to Thanksgiving Thursday next week, I will single out these three. The first is the warm sense of African American community around the making of the film. Secondly, Richard Williams’ uniquely successful experiment with the upbringing of Venus and Serena underlines the viability of home schooling, an increasingly important component of our parenting in these challenging times.

Thirdly and most importantly, for me, the movie provocatively highlights the unique beauty of father-daughter relationships, of which many of us men are either ignorant or even a little frightened. All creative works are pleasurable, but the pleasure should go beyond mere enjoyment towards some learning and reflection. My main reflection from King Richard is certainly about fathers and daughters.

Going back to the “community sense” I felt around King Richard, although the movie is typical Hollywood stock, Warner Brothers and all, I was struck by the array of famous African American personalities that participated in its making. It would take several columns of our paper to even barely enumerate the prominent figures behind the picture, all the way from Will Smith who both co-produces and stars, as Richard Williams, to the Williams sisters themselves. A truly touching detail in the story is that Will Smith actually shared his $40 million earnings on the movie with his less-known co-actors.

Back to matters educational, it struck me that what, a few decades ago, was regarded as Richard Williams’ “unconventional” approach to education, schooling his girls mostly at home, is becoming increasingly mainstream. Williams’ option probably arose from his desire to protect his girls from a racist and discriminatory system that would sap their self-confidence instead of boosting it. But in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and its toll on conventional education, we are all well-advised to consider seriously the options of home and communal schooling.

Williams, King Richard, was probably wise ahead of his times, with arguably the greatest performers of all time in their discipline to prove it. Indeed, as reports have it, other parents are emulating his blueprint, among them the family of Naomi Osaka, about whom we were chatting around the time of the Tokyo Olympics.

Let me end by returning to that sweet father-daughter matter. Venus and Serena Williams tell us, convincingly, that they love tennis. But I doubt if they loved tennis when they started playing it, when they were so young they could barely walk and hold a racket. My argument is that they learnt to love tennis because their father loved tennis and they loved their father.

I do wish fathers would really appreciate how much their daughters love them and long to be loved by them. The first and best things women learn about men should be from their fathers. That, however, can only come about if we find and make time for our daughters, from their earliest ages. We should not fall for the chauvinistic macho crudity of “abandoning” our girls entirely to the attention of their mothers.

I speak as the happy father of a truly successful and loving daughter.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and literature. [email protected]