“Be always a question mark” – Ben Okri



"Lying in bed overlooking my Rift Valley view"

At times it is easy to sink into routine, to become enveloped in the daily events of marking books, watching the West Wing or lying in bed overlooking my Rift Valley view. Yet occasionally there is a formidable power in stepping back and reflecting, questioning the fundamentals you prioritise and figuring out how to re-address the balance.

Now seems like the perfect opportunity to do that. I have been living, working and dreaming my new school. Any attempt to escape the confines of the compound is flouted by: no travel after dark rules, parent’s visiting days or the clawing (self-inflicted) pressure to be seen as ‘continually sociable’. However, this weekend I have succeeded. Here I am, alone, overlooking a stunning dam in the middle of a Kericho tea plantation with only the sound of birds and insects for company. 

Interestingly, the memory I re-play is one from my return to London over the summer. Curled up on a comfy sofa in the gift shop of The Tate, with an invisible string connecting me back here, to Africa, the words of the writer Ben Okri rang home:

“Africa is a challenge to the humanity and sleeping wisdom of the world. It is an eyeball-challenging enigma. Africa reveals what most hides in people. It reveals their courage or cowardice, their complacency or their conscience, their smallness or their generosity. Faced with Africa, nothing of what you truly are can hide. Africa brings to light the true person beneath their politeness, their diplomacy or their apparent good intention.”

So, my day of questioning begins: What is the enigma? What is being revealed about me? What am I attempting to hide? Unfortunately the answers appear intangible, out of grasp, away from my reaching hand. After a 6 year relationship with this country, have I stopped thinking? Developing? It almost feels like the intricate sketch-lines reflecting my personal relationship with Kenya are being slowly erased, rubbed out to reveal a blank canvas, ready for a different picture to replace them.

Why? Because I live in a bubble, so far removed from the realities of Africa that I feel the connection is eroding. The electric wire fence spanning the perimeter of the 300-acre compound is an explicit barrier against the neighbouring villages – the physical bubble shielding the substance within: the Western teaching methods, culture and community of the school. At least I’m lucky, able to step outside these confines by drawing on previous experiences and connections. But wouldn’t it be better if these two worlds could merge?

Only once over the last month can I say this has happened. A few weeks ago the English Department took eighty Year 10 students to the local marketplace on a creative writing assignment where each student posed as an investigative journalist ready to write about ‘Mitumba’ (second hand) clothes selling. Grinning students trudged through mud and rain, desperate to talk to market-sellers, proudly using their Kiswahili to inquisitively question fellow Africans about a different way of life. The results confirmed my belief that Africa does indeed reveal what hides in people. Advantaged students had the “courage” and the “conscience” to reflect on their own situation and write perceptively about the challenges facing individual people in their continent. Here are one student’s highlights:

 

“Mitumba is essentially a large, open air market hidden away within a Molo suburb; it is the image of backward Africa. The kind of place that the government hopes will never be discovered, but it is a charity’s ‘poster boy’. It is an area that has lived hand-in-hand with poverty for so long that it does not know anything else. It is an area that the more affluent Kenyans look upon with disdain and contempt, yet, if these kinds of markets did not exist, the average Kenyan would be lacking a place where they could buy the basic necessities needed for a decent quality of life and the unemployment rate in Kenya would be a lot greater….

I am Kenyan and I was surrounded by my own people, yet I have never felt more out of a place. I stood out like a sore thumb. I was their skin colour and I understood their language, but I was never ever going to be able to be accepted into the society that they had created. We were universes apart….

It is not enough for us as a nation to simply watch from the wayside and mutter about how the great unwashed are a stain on our nation and are draining away valuable resources.” – Adrian (Year 10)

So where does this leave my day’s experimentation in questioning and reflecting? Can I happily spend the afternoon swimming and reading in my isolated heaven, knowing I will return to the school compound before dark? I hope so. Ultimately, I have to accept these different strands of life, knowing that they will each weave into and out of my daily experiences, shaping my perceptions of this ever-changing kaleidoscope of Africa. Whichever image appears in the kaleidoscope, whether a sheltered international school or a rural family scene, each picture has the potential to be a unique “eye-ball challenging enigma”.