Find better ways of disciplining without causing injuries to body
Gideon Yegon, 14, being comforted by relative Rachel Keter at his hospital bed at War Memorial Hospital in Nakuru where he was admitted after being admitted with injuries sustained on his private parts during a caning incident in school. PHOTO | JOSEPH KIHERI | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- Somewhere in Kenya, as a daily newspaper reported on Friday, a teacher had caned a schoolchild to death.
- The only reason parents all over the world do entrust their children to schools is that teachers are in a good position to shape them, not only into intellectually knowledgeable but also into socially responsible and warm-hearted human beings.
Somewhere in Kenya, as a daily newspaper reported on Friday, a teacher had caned a schoolchild to death.
It thus seems that many schools do not take the issue seriously even though it has recently been raised a myriad of times. By what legal authority can anyone inflict such heavy bodily injury on a child, especially somebody else’s?
On the contrary, the only reason parents all over the world do entrust their children to schools is that teachers are in a good position to shape them, not only into intellectually knowledgeable but also into socially responsible and warm-hearted human beings. In that process, the cane can prove a useful implementation tool.
That is probably why, although we, who went to school in a colonial situation, were brutally flogged by our white teachers, it has raised no serious moral contradiction.
That is primarily because colonialism, especially of one race by another, has never been characterised by our idea of humaneness. In behaviour, the colonial schoolteacher was never a paragon of measure behaviour, much less of kindness.
In Kenya, indeed, certain Europeans publicly asserted that, in skin, black people had a different “wavelength” from white people, that the black skin could withstand the cane much better than the white skin and that, therefore, corporal punishment was what the doctor ordered for all recalcitrant black Africans, both at school and in the marketplace of labour.
Even a usually reasonable Englishman like Edward Carey Francis, our headmaster at the Alliance High School, Kikuyu, asserted repeatedly that the three basic races had different “wavelengths”.
So – contradictory as it might have sounded from a people as “civilised” as the British claimed so loudly – the average British colonial official was a brute in adjecto.
ABSOLUTE POWER
It turned out, however, that such cruelty is not racial. Though humanity is multi-racial, certain behavioural patterns are specific. As a celebrated Briton would have put it, it is only power that tends to corrupt whoever is wielding it for the time being, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The power that Caucasians wielded over the Negro natives in all walks of life did finally corrupt absolutely even the white individuals who purported to have brought to the poor benighted Africans the new evangelical message of Jesus.
Vis-à-vis his black domestic employee, even the missionary behaved with remarkable racial haughtiness.
But I have no evidence that, if the situation were turned upside-down overnight, the black missionary would behave differently.
For both races belong to the same species. Among the most notable characteristics of that species is that individual members can learn from one another. And yet, therein lies the tragedy.
It is that learning is not confined to positive things. Among the many negative things that the colonised African soon learned from the colonising European is unyapara – the itch to lord it over fellow human beings, to rob them of their belongings, to bear false witness to them whenever a situation demanded it, and so on.
POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE
Among human beings, these injustices take place between individuals. But soon they intrude themselves between genders, religions, tribes and races. Kenya’s experience has shown that they do not necessarily die as a result of political independence. Tribalism, say, may so intensify as to seriously threaten national integration.
If corporal punishment and other forms of colonial and post-colonial sanction – including endless priestly moralism, the police baton and grenade and the Chief Justice’s hammer – if all these had been taken seriously as instruments of ethico-intellectual empowerment, we might have survived the moral Gehenna into which independence has thrown us.
We might by now have devised powerful methods by which – at home, at school, at work – to restrain ourselves from injuring one another so terribly, in body, in feeling and in thought nationwide.
We might by now have become one people and moved towards material and spiritual adequacy and equity.
