NAIROBI (dpa) – Fourteen-year-old Nina hid her scarred knees beneath a long skirt, one which she has exchanged for her tattered school uniform.
It was the uniform which Nina was wearing when she and around 400 other pupils recently ran away from their boarding school near the Kenyan city of Nakuru.
They were fleeing the brutality of their teachers. Among other disciplinary methods, the teachers would use canes to make the girls crawl over a long gravel bath on their bare knees.
This is not an isolated incident in the school landscape of the eastern African country, which like others among the former British colonies does not exactly win good marks. Abuse and methods meant to prevent self-reliance are characteristic of the overfilled classrooms.
At the “Moi Girls School” in Kakameg, the shrill alarm bell wakes up the girls at 5 a.m. in their overcrowded and stale-smelling dormitory hall. The 230 girls jump out of their 60-centimetre wide cots, which are the only pieces of furniture.
Except for a cardboard box to keep ther personal belongings, there is not a touch of any privacy in the shabby hall, which is quickly empty. The reason why it empties fast becomes clear at the morning roll call – those who are late risk being caned.
“I was so badly beaten three times that I could no longer walk,” one teenage girl said. She said the reason for the beatings was that the teachers thought she was not running fast enough. “Being chased around is commonplace here.”
During the 10-minute lunch break, anyone caught loitering risks being sent to bed that night without any food – after the last classes are over at 10 p.m.
Deprivation of food, beatings and kickings are common in Kenyan schools. The Human Rights Watch organisation says that it is not rare for schoolchildren to be badly beaten for the smallest transgressions.
If they resist punishment, they get expelled from a school for which their parents must pay a great amount of money every three months. Often the tuition far exceeds their income, so the parents in some cases regard the school fees as a kind of retirement investment for their old age.
“Most schools in eastern Africa have taken on from their colonial masters a wrongly-understood concept of hierarchy and discipline, one which renders impossible any constructive learning,” says Kenyan political scientist Anyang’Nyongo.
“Instead of making them into democratic individuals happy to have an opinion, they are drilled to learn by rote,” he adds. “Their curriculum is so comprehensive that they don’t have any time to think about what they have learned, much less to apply it.”
Such blunt teaching methods are particularly found in all the countries which continued with the British school system after their independence. But educators say that hardly anywhere else is the brutality so great as in Kenya.
Even if they stay in school and graduate, most of the youngsters don’t have any prospects.
“Of the 440,000 leaving school this year, at most 20,000 of them will have a chance for a steady job,” said a Swiss educator who runs a private school in the capital Nairobi.
“The children are treated poorly, live under poor conditions, are given a bad education and on top of it all, have dim prospects for the future,” the Swiss educator added. “The schools are becoming a breeding grounds for a huge potential of violence.”
Often enough it has happened that teachers themselves have become victim of their own brutal methods. In the city of Nyeri, the schoolkids set fire to the school director.
And, the most recent act of revenge was self-directed. At a boarding school in Kyanguili, frustrated older students set their school on fire in which 67 younger pupils died.
As a court in Nairobi is finding during an investigation, the fire was set because their school director had humiliated them by making them take tests which were not officially recognised.
