. @Owaahh now that you raised the question of elitism in Kenyan education.... https://twitter.com/wmnjoya/status/1219985996776976384

Exam cheating and educational inequality started with colonial servants.

After WW I His Majesty's government started to privilege the public school and Oxbridge "gentleman" graduate as the best colonial administrator. To get "the best" they intended to use competitive exams.

But secretly, the government thought that "competitve exams would admit undesirable elements," and so they manipulated exams to ensure that the only people who passed came from "the right public school" and were Oxbridge men.

This meant that all the senior government were of bourgeois and aristocratic origin, with the same culture and ideology. And they filled posts in the church, army, politics and especially banking and finance.

Remember that these were the guys who started our missionary schools.

When the Oxbridgers were outnumbered by products from "London cramming academies," the British government changed the recruitment requirements to favor the Oxbridgers.

They called British from more humble backgrounds "pioneers and cowpunchers."

Basically the top admin positions were filled with British people indoctrinated with the ideology of the ruling class. They learned the "classics" and "impractical subjects " such as imperial history. No administrative skills or African languages.

The thinking was that colonial officers would learn by being thrown in the deep end in Kenya. But of course they didn't. They surrounded themselves with people who repeated what they wanted to hear. https://twitter.com/wmnjoya/status/1220250326332321793?s=20

All in all, the colonial government was built on graduates trained to embrace aristocratic ideals and support capitalist interests. It was never said explicitly of course. It was assumed. It taught bureacrats to operate with these principles, which persists today.

1. anti-rationalism: reject any ideas as being of "little practical value." Avoid theory and abstract analysis. Ignore problems until they become too big to ignore.

2. The society remained organic when protected by the ruling class.

(That's why the British believed they were protecting Africans from settlers)

3. Avoid conflict. Suppress it by appealing to solidarity, reduce big conflicts to a game. Literally. Like cricket matches between settlers and colonialists. Government is administration, not politics.

4. Protect the social order from individualism and materialism of capitalism. This is a contradictory principle, I haven't quite understood it.

I think it means "it is in the best interests of African that you make them stay in their lowly place and protect THEM from change."

The ideology of the government was to protect the social order and hirearchies, and to provide "order and stability in a setting of rapid change."

That's why Ezekiel Mutua erupts when at art works. He's not protecting morality. He's protecting GoK from change.