family.’ ”
The statement, though, was not entirely true. The children were being educated for jobs that were not available and taught the value of farmland they could probably never afford to buy. A city-bound African youth who has learned to read and write, even moderately well, does not want to work with his hands; he wants to be a clerk and wear a white shirt and a necktie and sit at a desk. That is status.
In the first-grade class room across from Mathini’s office, thirty orforty boys and girls were learning to count with the aid of little twigs. They applauded with gusto each time one of them gave the teacher the right answer. The teacher spoke to them in Swahili, a language they had difficulty understanding because their native tongue was Kikuyu. In the tenth-grade room nearby, an ancient wooden radio sat on another teacher’s desk and the dozen or so teen-agers there strained through the heavy static to hear the “creative writing” lesson being broadcast in English from Nairobi. The nursery school, a cement-floored room with bare blue walls located at the far side of the yard, had only a handful of children and fifty empty seats. The parents of the missing youngsters had been unable to pay the $1.85 semiannual school fee due the previous month and had been forced by the headmaster to withdraw their children from school until they came up with the money.
“These children know that without education there can be no employment,” said the first-grade teacher, Francis Waruiru. “They are desperate to learn. Their parents put great pressure on them to learn so they can go to Nairobi and get a job with a good salary.
“Even William here tries hard, but William’s a funny little boy. He writes everything upside down. See”—and the teacher, who had had no training in special education, held up William’s paper for us to examine—“you cannot read what he writes.”
“I don’t know why he does that. I sit down with him and show him slowly and then he writes the right way. Then he goes back to his desk and writes upside down again. The whole trouble is that William is forgetful. I have told him he must just practice harder. He’s really quite a mystery.”
The school has no facilities or money to serve lunch, so at noontime we drove with the headmaster a mile or two over the hills to the Happiness Café in Kurai. Ours was the only vehicle in sight and it drew stares from the people along the road who wore, like African villagers everywhere, a bewildering array of Western clothing: ski caps with tassels, broken straw hats, tattered suits with wide lapels, winter overcoats with holes and patches—clothing that had once hung in the closets of American families, had been collected by charity organizations, sold by the ton to junk dealers in New York and, finally, shipped at a profit for sale in the marketplaces of a thousand African villages.
To an outsider, Karai had the make-believe aura of a frontier town on a Hollywood set. A donkey dozed outside the First andLast Starlight Bar. The market, known as Oliver Njoroge’s Popular Store, was empty. Except for a woman hunkered by a pile of potatoes, the wide dirt path leading through the town was deserted and the only stirring was that of the wind, which had turned everything dust-brown. Karai was a time capsule, exuding neither ennui nor energy. It was just there.
Eight peasant farmers sat at the long benches in the Happiness Café, eating the daily special, a thirty-six-cent bowl of beef stew. A sign on the wall said: “No credit Sunday through Sunday.” The farmers ate in silence and paid no heed to the village idiot, who moved from table to table in a series of froglike jumps, holding out his palm for chunks of beef and grabbing crumbs of bread from the floor.
“I would be the first to admit that we don’t have very advanced people here,” said the subchief of Karai, James Kamau, as we finished our stew. “But the problem is that all the
The statement, though, was not entirely true. The children were being educated for jobs that were not available and taught the value of farmland they could probably never afford to buy. A city-bound African youth who has learned to read and write, even moderately well, does not want to work with his hands; he wants to be a clerk and wear a white shirt and a necktie and sit at a desk. That is status.
In the first-grade class room across from Mathini’s office, thirty orforty boys and girls were learning to count with the aid of little twigs. They applauded with gusto each time one of them gave the teacher the right answer. The teacher spoke to them in Swahili, a language they had difficulty understanding because their native tongue was Kikuyu. In the tenth-grade room nearby, an ancient wooden radio sat on another teacher’s desk and the dozen or so teen-agers there strained through the heavy static to hear the “creative writing” lesson being broadcast in English from Nairobi. The nursery school, a cement-floored room with bare blue walls located at the far side of the yard, had only a handful of children and fifty empty seats. The parents of the missing youngsters had been unable to pay the $1.85 semiannual school fee due the previous month and had been forced by the headmaster to withdraw their children from school until they came up with the money.
“These children know that without education there can be no employment,” said the first-grade teacher, Francis Waruiru. “They are desperate to learn. Their parents put great pressure on them to learn so they can go to Nairobi and get a job with a good salary.
“Even William here tries hard, but William’s a funny little boy. He writes everything upside down. See”—and the teacher, who had had no training in special education, held up William’s paper for us to examine—“you cannot read what he writes.”
“I don’t know why he does that. I sit down with him and show him slowly and then he writes the right way. Then he goes back to his desk and writes upside down again. The whole trouble is that William is forgetful. I have told him he must just practice harder. He’s really quite a mystery.”
The school has no facilities or money to serve lunch, so at noontime we drove with the headmaster a mile or two over the hills to the Happiness Café in Kurai. Ours was the only vehicle in sight and it drew stares from the people along the road who wore, like African villagers everywhere, a bewildering array of Western clothing: ski caps with tassels, broken straw hats, tattered suits with wide lapels, winter overcoats with holes and patches—clothing that had once hung in the closets of American families, had been collected by charity organizations, sold by the ton to junk dealers in New York and, finally, shipped at a profit for sale in the marketplaces of a thousand African villages.
To an outsider, Karai had the make-believe aura of a frontier town on a Hollywood set. A donkey dozed outside the First andLast Starlight Bar. The market, known as Oliver Njoroge’s Popular Store, was empty. Except for a woman hunkered by a pile of potatoes, the wide dirt path leading through the town was deserted and the only stirring was that of the wind, which had turned everything dust-brown. Karai was a time capsule, exuding neither ennui nor energy. It was just there.
Eight peasant farmers sat at the long benches in the Happiness Café, eating the daily special, a thirty-six-cent bowl of beef stew. A sign on the wall said: “No credit Sunday through Sunday.” The farmers ate in silence and paid no heed to the village idiot, who moved from table to table in a series of froglike jumps, holding out his palm for chunks of beef and grabbing crumbs of bread from the floor.
“I would be the first to admit that we don’t have very advanced people here,” said the subchief of Karai, James Kamau, as we finished our stew. “But the problem is that all the
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