Last Word
On Official Ineptness
The meeting had been called by the Provincial Education Officer, which implied to Ochieng that it was meant to address a crisis. The last time that schools in his area were summoned by the PEO was in the company of their parents, which in those days meant their mothers.
Ochieng grew up in the age of absentee fathers since they were gainfully employed, as the term went then, mostly in the East African Railways and Harbors or His and later Her Majesty’ s Government which meant in the towns which were far from their rural homes.
There was another group composed of farm laborers and domestic workers who worked in the vast wheat, tea and coffee plantations who were not allowed to have their families with them as it adversely affected productivity. Divide and rule was not only in politics.
Getting back to the PEO’ s summons, who was a quaint Briton in all respects, he had pompously announced that the colonial government was abandoning the mixed school concept and henceforth boys and girls would attend separate schools.
The PEO proceeded to rebuke the parents, reminding them that the reason their children were in school was to learn to read and write and not for the boys to find wives and subsequently elope from school to start illiterate families.
The colonial education system, intended to educate the natives as part of their grand plans to civilize them, had totally failed to recognize that local women were wife material at puberty so the young men saw wives, conveniently assembled, not fellow students.
Parents were required to attend the latest
To ask Nairobians to avoid muddy waters as if the rain is going to fall only on concrete and to beware of areas with fallen powerlines is to publicly admit the existence of poor infrastructure supported by even poorer planning if at all those departments still exist.
meeting, Ochieng was not about to miss this particular one specifically because it was going to be addressed by a new African PEO, the result of attaining independence and onto self-government.
The demeanor and language of the local PEO was surprisingly not different from that of the former British PEO and there was already murmuring in the crowd that they could not understand him as he spoke through his nose, the African expression for the British accent.
The PEO was fairly young and he proceeded to demonstrate his lack of cultural etiquette by starting to speak in an angry tone addressing the various District Education Officers who were present without even acknowledging the various elderly Headmen who were present.
The PEO, in a stern voice, was informing the DEOs that the rise in teenage pregnancies in the province was unacceptable and he wondered aloud why the DEOs were allowing such a shameful and appaling behavior to take root.
He referred them to the previous measures taken by the government, while he was still a toddler no doubt, to separate the genders and wondered why an apparently solved problem was rearing its ugly head again and compromising his otherwise stellar ascent to office.
He then proceeded to announce that all girls who got pregnant would not only be
114 MAL71 / 26 ISSUE