In Petals of Blood, there is no such thing as an apolitical education. A person’s education shapes how they think, so education is fundamentally important to politics. The novel illustrates the political nature of education through the boys’ boarding school, Siriana, which several major characters attend, including Munira and Chui. Munira and Chui attend Siriana together prior to Kenya’s independence. Their first British headmaster is fond of (if condescending to) the Kenyan students. Yet the novel suggests that under this headmaster, Siriana’s curriculum focuses exclusively on European writers and European sports—a focus that teaches the Kenyan students that Europe is the center of the world and that they should try to act European. This implicit teaching illustrates how a school’s curriculum signals what a school thinks is important—and thus carries a political message. Siriana’s next British headmaster, Fraudsham, is more overtly racist: he won’t let the students wear European clothes or wear shoes except to church and forces them to eat dirty food because he believes they should be not “black Europeans but true Africans.” In protest, Chui and Munira lead a student strike and are expelled. Their protest shows self-respect: Fraudsham’s definition of “true Africans” is false and racist. Yet Munira and Chui seem outraged in part because Fraudsham claims they can’t act European—which suggests that Siriana’s implicit political curriculum has caused them to internalize Europe-centric attitudes and values.
Neither Chui nor Munira develops beyond the Europe-centric attitudes and values they learn at Siriana. After Fraudsham retires as headmaster, Chui replaces him—and refuses the students’ demands for an Africa-centric curriculum, requiring that the students read only English writers and learn only European history. When the students strike in protest, he expels the ten ringleaders, including budding political activist Karega. Much later, when Munira and Karega are teaching at the same school, Munira targets Karega for talking to the students about “blackness” and “African peoples” and eventually gets him fired. Though Munira has a personal motive for hurting Karega—Karega is involved with Munira’s former lover Wanja—the means he uses to attack Karega suggest that he, like Chui, permanently internalized Siriana’s Europe-centric values. Chui and Munira’s failure to move beyond their early education’s damaging political content suggests a bad education can permanently warp people’s political consciousness—so a good, politically informed educational system is necessary for political progress.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Education ThemeTracker
Education Quotes in Petals of Blood
‘We must always be ready to plant the seed in these last days before His second coming. All the signs—strife, killing, wars, blood—are prophesied here.’
‘How long have you been in Ilmorog?’ asked the tall one, to change the subject from this talk of the end of the world and Christ’s second coming. He was a regular churchgoer and did not want to be caught on the wrong side.
Kenyan people had always been ready to resist foreign control and exploitation. The story of this heroic resistance: who will sing it? Their struggles to defend their land, their wealth, their lives: who’ll tell of it?
‘To understand the present . . . you must understand the past. To know where you are, you must know where you came from, don’t you think?’
He did not therefore want to hear any more nonsense about African teachers, African history, African literature, African this and that: whoever heard of African, Chinese, or Greek mathematics and science? What mattered were good teachers and sound content: history was history: literature was literature, and had nothing to do with the colour of one’s skin.
‘Educators, men of letters, intellectuals: these are only voices—not neutral, disembodied voices—but belonging to bodies of persons, of groups, of interests. You, who will seek the truth about words emitted by a voice, look first for the body behind the voice. The voice merely rationalizes the needs, whims, caprices, of its owner, the master.’
‘Are there pure facts? When I am looking at you, how much I see of you is conditioned by where I stand or sit; by the amount of light in this room; by the power of my eyes; by whether my mind is occupied with other thoughts and what thoughts. […] Even assuming that there were pure facts, what about their selection? Does this not involve interpretation?’
‘The junior staff—the workers on the school compound—were going to join us. And one or two teachers were sympathetic. They too had grievances, about pay and conditions of work and Chui’s neglect. This time we were going to demand that the school should be run by a committee of students, staff and workers . . . But even now we are determined to put an end to the whole prefect system . . . And that all our studies should be related to the liberation of our people . . .’
