"One of my classmates looked at all my effort and laughed. She said to me: what’s the point of putting all this effort into the assignment? I’m just going to copy someone else’s work, and I will still get an A. A month or so later, our term papers were returned. Guess what I got. An A. And guess what my friend got. An A. You can imagine how bad I felt. The next time I was home, I lamented to my family: What’s the point of doing honest work, if you are going to score the same as someone who doesn’t put in the work?"

“Jones was the CEO of a donor foundation called Phelp-Stokes Fund. The fund had supported Booker T.’s ideas about education in the US, so in 1924, Jones shared Booker T.’s education model with the British colonial government. The Phelps-Stokes Commission proposed that Africans should be taught technical subjects, especially carpentry, metalwork and hygiene. Although Africans were to be taught to integrate their knowledge with African culture, they were not to be taught African history or African art, because according to the colonialists, Africans had no history or art worth studying. And settlers, like the Delamere family, also did not want Africans to receive education in the arts and humanities, because, they said, the arts would corrupt our minds and make us start asking for unnecessary things like freedom.”

“Why does this matter? Well, in the 1920s, the British were trying to entrench colonialism in Kenya and needed Africans with skills that could build the colonial economy. So inevitably, they had to answer the same question: what kind of education should Africans receive? And because they were not sure, they were offered help from the US, by guess who? A man called Thomas Jesse Jones.”

“Booker T. was simply being practical and offering a short term solution. But that’s not what whites understood. What they heard to say was that racial equality was impossible, and that the only education black people deserved was technical skills; not skills in the humanities or the arts.”

“One major idea came from a man called Booker T. Washington. He said: why don’t we just train black people in technical skills from which they can earn a living? We don’t need to be equal to whites; we just need to work and take care of ourselves.”

“After slavery ended in the US in 1865, the country’s black population faced a huge problem. Because they had been slaves, they were uneducated and had no property or skills. Yet they were expected to now compete in employment or in entrepreneurship with the rest of America. So the major question facing the leaders was this: how do we educate our people to be self-reliant?”

“As for my sister’s words, they did come true. I still remember that term paper. It was through that paper that I learned about the Phelps-Stokes commission of 1924. And just in case you don’t know why that matters, let me tell you.”