The Gap in Kenyan Literature Education
Or, a 20-year journey condensed.
There are several things that the Kenyan education system has done right. (I am speaking of 8-4-4 here because that is what I went through and because the competency-based curriculum [education?] is still finding itself.) One of them is selecting Kenyan novels, short story collections, and plays to serve as the focal point of the Literature and Fasihi syllabi. Notably, these texts always feature heavy political themes, which is useful for introducing those coming of age to the realities of how our country is governed and why things are…well, you know.
There are also several things our education system has done poorly. One of them is introducing Literature and Fasihi — and thus, literary analysis — quite late, in Form Three. Technically, they introduced it in Form One, but in my experience it was too shallow an introduction to do the concepts of oral literature and poetry any justice. I genuinely have no idea to this day what all that isimujamii business was about. And telling me how to describe the rhyme scheme of a poem and then not telling me why that was necessary at all was a waste of everyone’s time.
And that is the problem.
Allow me to start at the beginning.
When I was nine years old, my classteacher told my mother that my writing abilities showed promise. My mother, after undertaking her own observations and arriving at the same conclusion, set about trying to figure out how to make an author out of me. She bought me as many books as she could, encouraged me to write, drummed into me that I could and would publish books. This works well to a point, especially with an extremely reserved and risk-averse child. It puts you in the right frame of mind for achievement.
However, eventually, skill building requires deliberate practice. And deliberate practice requires one-on-one coaching with someone with the expertise to give constructive feedback, suggest specific techniques to improve specific aspects of your skill, and expose you to the greater world within which your skill exists.
Without such a person to support our book writing ambitions, I experienced several false starts, each of which sunk my confidence a little lower. I did not have access to the internet or to a library either, so finding information about writing on my own was not an option. So I wrote the basic compositions we were taught to write and got high marks and that was it.
But what about your teachers, you ask. Surely they would have been able to offer some guidance.
That’s the thing. The way that the education system was set up, with everything aimed squarely at a good grade in KCPE, creativity and exploration was too risky. The purpose of your English education was to ensure your language abilities were good enough to earn a good grade in the national exam. A worthy goal, true, but it came at a cost. My teachers could not introduce me to different kinds of poems, short stories, novels, or essays because it would have taken time away from all the past papers I needed to do in order to prepare for KCPE. Neither they nor I had the time or the capacity for anything that was not oriented towards this exam. By the time I was 13, it was a punishable offence to be caught with a novel in school. Our library lessons, previously a few times a term if we were lucky, were completely removed from our timetables.
High school was not much different. The only writing we did involved the same narrow-scoped compositions. These were occasionally assigned and rarely graded, so there was not much opportunity to find out what metrics were being used to award your marks or what you could do to improve. Most English and Kiswahili teachers within the 8-4-4 system give the same generic feedback for everything to everyone: “Be more creative (but not too creative), tumia msamiati, add similes and metaphors and proverbs, zingatia mada, usipotoke maudhui.” How exactly you were to undertake these tasks was anybody’s guess. The library was for doing assignments and falling asleep while writing the notes you would cram the day before exams. A creative writing or journalism club or a school magazine would have helped, but those were dead by the time I arrived on the scene.
Once you got to Form Three, all you were expected to read over and over were the assigned setbooks. Beyond identifying stylistic devices and describing plot and characterisation, no one seemed to actually know anything about what I can now call literary theory, and teachers resorted to recommending this or that mwongozo — supplementary guides written by other teachers on specific setbooks, telling you the answers to essay questions you might get in your KCSE Literature paper. Because of mwongozo culture (and the fact that many literature teachers do not love literature themselves, or they can no longer love it after teaching the same things in the same way for 20 years straight), I have friends who did and passed KCSE Literature without ever having read all the way through the very books they were tested on.
I do not blame our teachers for spending as little time as possible on our literature education because it is a difficult thing to teach in an exam-centric system like what we had. I imagine one can read only so many poorly written compositions before you stop trying altogether. Better to focus on teaching what can be memorised and regurgitated. Maybe if we started learning literature proper earlier, we might have stood a better chance of understanding what was going on over there in that subject. This is also why, for all the flaws in its execution, I think the new curriculum might have more space within itself for creativity and exploration. (I cannot say that I am confident yet about how literature education will fare when the resources available to schools are the same ones that were available in the previous system.)
But at the end of it, a gap was left. Perhaps not for the students who were never going to be that interested in how Waiyaki in The River Between was a victim of circumstances, but certainly for the ones who were interested and who were frustrated that they did not understand what they were being asked to memorise.
I did well in my exams in the end, but I knew I had come away from those four years with no greater understanding of how to read closer, how to read wider, how to interpret what I had read, how to connect it with the world into which I was stepping, how to approach my own writing, how to explore my interest in books in any tangible way. After nearly a decade of school, I was no closer to the book writing dreams, and I no longer had much confidence that it was something worth pursuing. I can tell you that no one was more frustrated by this than my mother.
So out of high school, now in the Great Out There, I wondered where to start. What was the first step towards “Writer”? The best answer I could come up with was “write”, even though I did not know how to be strategic about it. If there was a path in front of me I could not see it. So I started a WordPress blog (as one does) that almost no one read, and truthfully, I was grateful for it. Because I was floundering, and I imagine it did not look very dignified. (I also opened a Tumblr account to try my hand at writing and sharing poetry but we shan’t speak of that.)
I wrote this blog for about six years, getting a little better at that whole business each year. At some point I saved up enough to pay for hosting so that I could be on a website that was all mine, no ads or anything. I changed the name to one that was more succinct. I read about how to write essays and how to write short stories. I published some on the blog and kept some in a folder in my laptop named SCRIBBLES. An older friend from church who was a writer gave me a few books and asked me to write my reflections on them. I enjoyed the exercise but he never gave me any feedback, so that was that. In school, I majored in psychology and minored in journalism because there was no literature department. I discovered quickly that just because you like writing doesn’t mean you will like journalism.
I saved up my lunch and transport money to buy books. I started at least three of what I imagined would be novels and only got as far as page 3 on each of them. I attended book festivals when I could, often unable to buy anything and unable to strike up conversation with anyone. Life can be hard for an introverted 21-year-old who only knows how to speak when spoken to first. I fantasised about becoming an author, about working at a publishing house — the usual for bookish people. I started a second degree in law. I dropped out promptly. Just because you like reading doesn’t mean you will like law.
I took a creative writing class in my final year in university. It was great, mostly because the teacher had just the sort of personality I enjoy in a teacher and because there were only seven of us in class. I did my community service at a low-income primary school, teaching English. I did my internship at a small psychology practice, handling social media management and content marketing. I got a gig doing the same for a small nonprofit organisation. I graduated. Another older friend whom I met at a literature event gave me some freelance writing work and paid me real money for it. Then she gave me her young adult (YA) novella to edit. Things were looking up.
I job-hunted. I was rejected. Again and again, for months. I tried online academic writing for money. Hated it. I kept making a little pocket money from the social media and content marketing gig. Contemplating a master’s in adolescent psychology, I enrolled for a diploma in psychological counselling. It went alright. Then I sent a Twitter DM to the founder of a local publishing house that focuses on children’s books, encouraged by the aforementioned second older friend. The publisher said they had no internships but that she was running an online creative writing course to help writers learn how to write short stories for the YA audience. I asked my mother to pay for me and buy the books that would be studied in the course. She did.
I did the course, produced one short story for younger teens by the end of it. What a world that course opened up. Weeks after the course was done, the publisher sent me three YA manuscripts to critique and said she would pay me 4k per critique. When I submitted the work (and marvelled at the most money I had made doing literature things at that point), she offered me a paid internship as her editorial assistant. Let me tell you — the elation? It was like I’d been banging on a door and someone finally let me in.
I worked at the publishing company for a little less than two years. I learnt how books are made and sold. I sharpened my editing skills. Then, COVID. Most of us got laid off. I enrolled for a master’s degree, specialising in children’s and YA literature. Half the time I worked on a novel for the middle-grade demographic. Half the time we read and analysed a book every week, starting from books for 7–9 year-olds and finishing with books for 16–18-year-olds. I wondered what such a reading booklist might look like in the Kenyan context. I am still working on that.
As the master’s degree progressed I joined the editorial team of a Pan-African literary magazine called Lolwe, after Nam Lolwe, Lake Victoria’s original name. I learnt what goes on behind the scenes in literary magazine publishing, learnt what a tough business it is, learnt why literary magazines keep sprouting all over the world regardless. I read a lot about the business of book publishing, its history, and how the infrastructure runs. I rediscovered my love for romance novels. I shut down the blog at last and switched to an email newsletter.
Now I work in nonprofit communications again. When I’m not at my job I look in the direction of literature. I look back at the decade through which I stumbled about looking for a way into an understanding of the world of stories. I think about how long it took to learn on my own. I think about how I despaired at my mother’s never-wavering refrain — “When are you publishing a book?” — because when indeed. I think about the older people I encountered who gave me a chance and built me up with a little more confidence about what was possible. I think about how much more I could have gained from sustained contact with them and others like them.
In honour of this younger version of me, who didn’t know but really wanted to, I work now to create the spaces that would have made the journey a little easier, a little shorter.
I’ve explored a few different ways to do this. The first step was setting up this substack to share what I am continually learning about the Kenyan publishing and literary landscape. If you could share it with someone you know who is interested in this sort of thing, that would be quite helpful.
The second was finally putting together those short stories filed away under SCRIBBLES. Over the years I kept returning to them, rewriting them to match my strengthened writing abilities. They are now published in a short story collection titled Tears Make a Daughter. Publishing it allowed me to learn more about the practicalities of bringing a book to print and into a reader’s hands. I am richer for the experience, and now I can be more helpful to others interested in navigating the publishing landscape. You can get the ebook on Kindle here (please let me know if you have trouble with the link) or you can reach out to me to get a physical copy at Ksh.1500. I am working on getting it into bookshops in Nairobi.
The third is my ongoing preparation for a PhD in literature. I cannot say very much about this as I also don’t know very much, but I am interested in the treatment of romance in Kenyan literature. The Roses and Wine Romance Book Club is part of my preliminary exploration, so if you know a Nairobian who would enjoy discussing romance novels by African authors, please point them in my direction.
The fourth is my latest little project, The Kenyan Bookmaker Literature Workshop. If you have in your life a teenager with a natural inclination towards the world of books, this may be of value to them.
My thesis for this is that if a writer can learn what it is to write and be published as a teenager, then we can finish with a lot of the floundering early on, and they can leave high school with a clearer vision of what they would like to do with their love of the written word. They can spend their first decade after high school figuring out how to access even greater depth in their work, not learning for the first time what is even possible. It took me 15 years; it doesn’t need to take them 15 years too.
While I intend for the workshop to run virtually, I am also interested in hosting an in-person one during the upcoming August school holiday. I hope to have a poster to share soon. In the meantime, please help me spread the word by sharing the Workshop page. It’s got a link to a Google Form that a young writer can fill to express their interest.
I’ve invited you, in many, many words, to look at the path I have taken to where I am now and to look at the path I would like to take forward. I am inspired, of course, by the many other people already working to bridge the gap I am talking about, so that the Michelles in school now can have an easier time of it.
For instance, I assume many had and have the sort of teaching I wish I had, the lucky bastards. So I am certain that there are many English and Literature teachers doing the Lord’s work all over the place. Plus, internet accessibility helps a great deal; students can fill many of their own gaps.
Several organisations are also working in this space. Start a Library Trust, for example, is on a mission to establish libraries in public schools across the country. Pocket Libraries is working to establish little libraries in neighbourhoods in Nairobi. Hopefully, I get to publish a conversation with them soon. Book Bunk has been working to restore Nairobi’s historic libraries. And, of course, more and more educators and policy people are seeing the need to improve things at the classroom level.
It may be slow work, but change is happening, and it is heartening. I am just happy to be participating in my small ways.