THE SOJOURNER: Brainwashing the Young Minds in the 70s at Mkwawa High School

A week or so ago I read in the ‘Cutting Edge’ column of the famous Kenyan Sunday Nation an interesting piece on the increasing and worrying episodes of secondary school students burning their dormitories in that country of Uhuru.

One Prof Sam Chege had asked why students were doing so, and a response came from a fellow don, one X. N. Iraki. “It is because that will ensure they go home. Their homes are much better than schools as they have WI-FI, TV or home theatre, power, good food and other amenities.,” said Iraki.

He added that during their days “we could not burn dorms; they were better than our homes. It was in school that we ate bread, watched TV, used a flush toilet, and met modernity for once and avoided the toil at home”.

This sent my mind racking to the days of my secondary and high school stint at the then famous Mkwawa High School in Iringa in the late 60s and early 70s. Apart from the good food we were also provided with some free red blazers and ties to go with, emblazoned “St. Michaels and Georges, Iringa – Tanganyika Territory.”

One of the most enjoyable and memorable programme at the school was the Friday evening screening of films in our school main hall.

It was in here that we watched some interesting films including the memorable westerns, ‘One Silver Dollar’, ‘The Dirty Dozen’ , ‘The Good the Bad and the Ugly’ and many others. Using our school film projector we were able to come to an understanding with the then Highland Cinema in town whereby we borrowed some of their popular films they received.

But we also received several films from other institutions including the European Union, China, the then East German and West German as well as some from the British Council. Apart from learning the life and communities in these far off lands, these films were definitely part of our globalisation process.

The most popular films, however, were those provided by the USIS, the information services of the US Government. And they were to say the least very addictive.

The Americans sent to us many films on the supposedly ‘nirvana’ life of the African-Americans there. There was the popular and colourful ‘Nipsey Show’ featuring weekly shows of the then famed American Soul singers including James Brown, Soul Brother No 1, as he used to call himself, and the lady soul sister Aretha Franklin.

These films naturally brainwashed us into believing that the US was the best land for blacks to live in. They ‘selectively’ showed the glamour and splendor the blacks lived in and their soul rocking music.

At Mkwawa we even established our own soul music band called ‘The Midnight Movers’. We played such numbers including ‘I am Black and Proud’ and ‘Sex Machine’ by James Brown. We copied his dressing and moves and even tried hard to miserably re-do our hairstyles to don that famous Afro look.

Naturally under these circumstances we never looked forward to going home on holiday to our dark and dusty villages straddling the many remote valleys and ridges of Bongoland. Understandably there was no way we could ever entertain such outrageous ideas like burning our dorms.

But with education and globalisation of information flow we have come to grasp the hard facts about real life in the US. We have seen how blacks are shot and killed randomly by police due to racial profiling and how poor some of the marginalised communities there are.

And now we see how Trump, through deceit, lies, some racist tendencies and stormy twitters has miraculously managed to reduce that great country’s politics to the level of those of a third-world banana republic. Indeed we have come a long way!

The author is a veteran journalist and communication expert based in Arusha.