Letter to students writing their final exams

My elder sister, Dorothy, is a woman I deeply respect and profoundly admire. Three weeks ago, when she reminded me to send my final wishes to her first born son, whom they named after Mau Mau freedom fighter Bildad Kaggia, I went through the list of thematic areas fit for the final push that could inspire a Form Four student whom I have watched his childhood development closely to the adult he’s about to become in due course.

Keeping up with young people has become an extreme sport for members of my generation. They have the pace of a burning dry grass and the patience of Members of Parliament waiting to catch their flights after voting to impeach Rigathi Gachagua.

To Bildad Ojwang, your classmates at Mbita High School, and all the 965,501 candidates across 10,755 centers entering the KCSE ringside from Monday, this country is in your hands. It might sound like another punchline from an overnight vigil at a Pentecostal revival crusade, kindly do not take this lightly – we are relying on you to come from the exam room and save us out here from this convoluted mess of a pit we have been digging for ourselves since 1963.

While this letter might sound like a plea for help, it actually is an admission of complicity. When our pre-independence freedom fighters made it untenable for the British Empire to continue extracting our natural resources for their manufacturing industries in the North, and forced their hand into leaving the scene for Kenyans to run their land, there was passionate euphoria – for the freedom that we so duly desired had finally come.

Tomorrow, all roads will be leading to the Kwale Stadium for the annual Mashujaa Day celebrations; a day deliberately inserted on our national calendar to collectively honour all those who have contributed towards the basic rights and constitutional freedoms that we take lightly today, starting with Field Marshall Dedan Kimathi to six-month-old Baby Samantha Pendo who was bludgeoned to death in her cot by beastly police officers running riot in Kisumu following the contested 2017 General Elections.

Non-negotiable virtue

As you watch the live proceedings from Kwale, do not get consumed into the glitz and glam of the KDF trooping of the colour – a colonial carryover originally mounted to celebrate the birthday of the British monarch – but instead call the television stations to focus their camera lenses on the faces of those in the terraces, and find out if they have anything to smile about and write about it in your exams.

This will be one way of sending a message to your examiners that you have also been seeing things and they aren’t looking good. Empathy might not be an examinable subject, but as we have come to learn lately, those who read the ground accurately might fail in their exams but they’ll always have a mountain to run back to.

My generation have come to you with this success card, wishing you good luck and better health during the one-month period of your final test, because in you we see a generation with the drive to break free from all encumbrances that have held us back. In you we see the Silver Star that guided the three wise men in the nativity story. The whole country is on standby asking when we should start the Great Trek to come pay you homage – if you’re ready to put on the armour of God and slave for His forsaken people.

This is by no means a light task we’re asking of you. We have been there before, and we’ve felt the hard steel of the fire-breathing dragons that we have met on the way. These monsters are bad news – they kill fledgling dreams, diminish career pathways, eat up kinship ties, and scatter away collective solidarity. They’re not enemies you go at with half-conviction, otherwise you’ll be instant minced meat. Courage is a non-negotiable virtue you will need going forward.

The good news is that your generation might have 99 problems but being scared is not one of them. You’re the generation that has been upsetting the status quo with real talk and honest vibes. 

Kenyans of goodwill

Do not let the home environment that shielded you from direct personal responsibility discourage you from venturing headlong into the outside world and continuing with your revolutionary streak. Science has proven that your parents who loved you when you were in school will still love when you’re outside here fighting it out in the Kazi Mtaani trenches, because every time there’s a victory recorded on the scoreboard it would be to the direct benefit of them too.

If you’re to part ways with your classmates whom you have been friends with for four years straight, do not allow the challenge of geography to diffuse the personal bond of comradeship you have painfully nurtured and delicately sustained – you might find yourself in the same institution of higher learning later immediately afterwards, or at a common workplace near you in the midstream, or even become in-laws later in life.

To change the country for the common good, you will need to transcend the anathema of tribal identity, tap into your collective desire for a little heaven here in this corner of the earth, and work towards purging the spirit of ambivalence that will threaten to take root once you begin going. We tell you these things openly because the generations that have gone before you started with the same vigour and vitality but were met with periodical blackouts along the way, orchestrated by those who afraid of looking at the sun without goggles on, and aided by those within their trusted spheres of influence.

As you begin you’re the final leg of your life as a child in the broader context of the law, our wish is that you take time to have a personal meeting with yourselves, preferably in the tranquility of your personal space, and get to answer the question on what country you would want to live in when you finally step out of the school gates never to return as an admission number.

On behalf of all friends, relatives, and Kenyans of goodwill; we would like to take this earliest opportunity to wish you the final grade that you have been working for. But if you decide to short-circuit the exam system to hoodwink us into an adulterated glory, this is to inform you that there’s a current virulent purge going on in the civil service of all those who earned their government jobs by false pretense. Your children will be unkind to you if you joined the villains.

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