Originally intended to be a medical college, Alliance High School opened its doors in January 1926. The epic narrative of the Kikuyu institution, however, is how the decision not to establish the college would ultimately change Kenya’s political climate and create a new elite that would control the country for generations.
The Kenyatta Government’s senior positions were controlled by graduates of the Alliance. Later, the former students would exploit the Alliance alumni links to forge a close alliance that shaped Kenyan politics and economy.
The main architects of the new Kenya have been recognized as fifteen particular elderly lads. Because girl education was not given much importance in colonial Kenya, there were no girls.
In the whole nation, there were just two girls enrolled in junior secondary schools by 1945. The second goal was to assist Africans in finding work possibilities within the colony, while the first goal was to maintain the colonial framework.
The students’ political and social unrest brought them together at Alliance, establishing the foundation for an educated elite that would later take key positions in the government and fight the existing quo in order to usher in a new Kenya.
Ironically, alliance turned become the arena for contesting the colonial system and its guiding ideals.
Alliance helped to shape an educated African youth that, although a byproduct of Western modernization and at best moderate, was to challenge the paternalistic colonial system that was denying them access to political and social adulthood, even though the then-colonial structure did not favor political empowerment.
However, by producing a new elite, education at Alliance was meant to assist the colonial authority in undermining the established ethnic hierarchy. Historians have noted that the goal was to develop an efficient, submissive labor force rather than responsible African citizens. Although the students believed that their education would emancipate them, this ended up being the primary source of their dissatisfaction.
As a result, when Alliance opened in January 1926, it was agreed that its purpose would be to develop character rather than provide education as a means to an end. This agreement came about after much resistance and negotiation between the government, the missionaries (represented by Reverend John William Arthur), and the settlers (represented by Hugh Cholmondeley, the 3rd Baron Delamere).
Carey Francis enrolled at Alliance in 1940, but the institution had gradually stopped offering its original practical courses. Following four years of secondary education, the first group of pupils had taken the Cambridge School Certificate two years prior.
Carey Francis was in a unique position to shape an entire generation that would be essential in molding the Kenyatta administration because he would lead the organization until 1962.
One Kenyatta Cabinet Minister, Kyale Mwendwa, famously remarked, “I became East African at Makerere and Kenyan at Alliance.”
Strong-willed and instilling high expectations in his students was Carey Francis. There were also a lot of expectations. Only fifteen of the fifty-six boys who joined in 1942 advanced to Form 4.
Carey Francis
Edward Carey Francis was born in Hampstead, Britain, on September 12, 1897. He attended William Ellis School, where he excelled academically and was elected captain of the football, cricket, tennis, and athletic teams.
At the age of 17, he enlisted in the army and advanced to the rank of lieutenant at the start of World War I in 1914. After the war, he was one of the best math students at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was given a scholarship. Influenced by prominent Trinity mathematicians of the era, like Hardy, Littlewood, and Pollard, his mathematical brilliance was evident in the subject of analysis.
As a result, he was bestowed with many honors, such as the Rayleigh Prize for 1923, and his writings were published in the November 1925 Cambridge Philosophical Society proceedings.
He was one of the founding teachers of the new Faculty of Mathematics at Cambridge. He was also the secretary of the Board of the Mathematics Faculty following the establishment of the faculties by Cambridge in 1926 under the new laws.
Nevertheless, Carey Francis’ passion was serving in distant areas, and this was his desire even in the face of all these obstacles.
He left his job as a Cambridge professor in 1928 to accept a lay teaching post with the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Kenya.
Upon his initial posting to Maseno in Nyanza, he was given the moniker Achuma, which translates to “man of steel.”
At that time, Maseno only offered junior secondary examinations, with the best candidates being accepted into Alliance.
They do admirably at work, yet they struggle in every other area that matters to me the most. Carey Francis said that his pupils who joined Alliance “seem to me to become insufferably conceited, unctuously pious, selfish, slack at everything except books and examinations.” The greatest lads fade away year after year as rot takes hold and they fall apart. They lose all of Maseno’s affection, which has distinct meanings.
His goal was to raise pupils who were both obedient and disciplined. When he got to Alliance, it was what he wanted to accomplish. He thought that the students felt like undergrads most of the time, and from the start he intended to destroy their snobbish behavior. In a subsequent letter, he said, “Much of this attitude still persisted, and I was ready to do anything to see that it didn’t take root here.”
In addition to the prefect system, he instituted yearly reports that were distributed to parents, education officers, and chiefs, serving as a signal that they were representing their communities at Alliance.
This was a stark contrast to the desires of the pupils. Building an African elite was not his job, like that of his colonial contemporaries. His job was to shape submissive colonial system servants.
Although he was a devout Christian, he had a colonial mindset. a wayward guy, a victim of his time,” Julius Gecau, who disapproves of Carey Francis’s domineering behavior, stated.
Gecau declined to enter Makerere and worked various jobs in Nairobi, including selling illicit beer, to pay for his passport. in last, he enrolled in Ewings Christian College in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, in order to become ready to transfer to a university. In 1954, he graduated from economics school in India after receiving the M.P. Shah Scholarship from a private foundation.
Gecau did not return, like other students who were left behind by Kenya’s State of Emergency. Instead, he filed for a fellowship to the University of Chicago, where he completed his MA degree, and in 1956 he enrolled in the London School of Economics. In 1957, he went back to Kenya and started working for British American Tobacco (BAT). Later on, he was named Kenya Power and Lighting Company’s executive director.
The story of Gecau shows how the career path of those who defied Carey Francis and opted for higher education elsewhere was shaped.
“At this time we did not like Alliance due to Carey Francis’ attitude towards Africans because it differed little from that of colonial district officers,” Henry Mulli said of the “very good school.”
While describing Alliance as a positive environment, Dr. Julius Kiano called Carey Francis a “very very difficult man” and said, “We had a good time, as good as it could be under Carey Francis.”
As a result, Carey Francis denied his pupils the opportunity to develop into mature individuals. Instead, they were muted and faced obstacles in their way.
Carey Francis forbade the wearing of shoes, fez, or long pants, unless it was necessary for medical reasons, as a sign of his will to alter the pupils’ exclusive mindset.
Alliance member Dr. Benjamin Kipkorir states that they considered these actions as a “direct challenge to the dignity of the educated African youth.”
Carey Francis said that Africans shouldn’t be forced to abandon their culture in order to get an education. He even had the African workers at the school wear shorts, which caused quite a stir. They felt belittled since students at King’s College, Budo, Uganda, which is comparable to Alliance, wore blazers and pants. They were denied this type of status by Carey Francis.
However, he established a corporate identity and established Alliance as a preeminent institution, which allowed him to create an aura of mysterious status. Alliance was founded on the principles of service by Christian Englishmen who embodied the imperial ideal, under the famous leadership of Carey Francis.
Fearful of Carey Francis and aware of the injustices they faced, the students would use a variety of resistance tactics to elude the colonial tactics. At Makerere, this began to take shape.
Makerere
On Makerere Hill, close to Kampala, Makerere was founded as the Native Technical College in 1922. The two-year general diploma course was intended to give East African students technical instruction, but the students thought that Makerere was not a legitimate institution and chose to pursue degrees elsewhere.
Certain others, such as Julius Gecau, declined to sit for admission tests, questioning why it would take them six years to become medical assistants rather than physicians. Consequently, students started looking for scholarships to study overseas, either at minor US universities or at South Africa’s Fort Hare University, home of Charles Njonjo and Munyua Waiyaki.
Some, like Dr. Julius Kiano, left Makerere after just one year in order to attend a modest American institution on scholarship.
Motivated by Mbiyu Koinange, who had returned from the US with a Masters degree from Ohio Wesleyan University, and Eliud Mathu, who had become a teacher at Alliance, ten of the initial group of fifteen from Alliance were able to complete their university degrees.
Mathu encouraged his pupils to continue his professional path by teaching at Alliance until 1942, the year he departed for South Africa and England.
After ten years in the US, Mbiyu Koinange returned with a master’s degree, which encouraged the Alliance students to pursue higher education overseas. Koinange quickly rose to the position of principal of Githunguri’s Independent African Teachers College, a for-profit institution dedicated to preparing African teachers to teach curriculum that benefits the continent.
This was a bold step that defied colonial ideology, which called for educating a limited number of Africans to serve as low cadre employees, secretarial officers, and support personnel for the colonial administration.
Carey Francis, for his part, did not like the idea of Alliance students going abroad to fetch degrees. He argued, like many other British missionary teachers, that graduate Africans had no room in the colony.
“I know of no one who has clearly benefited from an overseas course. Some have clearly been harmed, some ruined. Even those who are successful in getting overseas education are damaged; … and their minds are taken from their work,” said Carey Francis.
Education in East Africa changed with the end of World War II. African students could now read for degrees in the UK with the help of bursaries, and most colonial officials found it annoying when Makerere became a University College.
Africans in Kenya experienced discrimination due to the colonial system, regardless of their status. Thus, merit was subordinated to other local concerns.
This was the situation with Njoroge Mungai, who returned to Kenya in 1959 following his time spent studying medicine at Stanford University from 1951 to 1957. He chose to build a clinic in Thika instead of trying to fit into the system, though.
These youths were transforming Africa, “to the alarm of District Commissioners and Kenya settlers and the sadness of those anthropologists who preferred them naked,” as former Makerere principal Bernard de Busen would later write.
The churches also urged Alliance students to enroll in their network of universities and institutions since Alliance had close ties to the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. For this reason, Fort Hare and Ewings became popular destinations for students. at the UK, some of the institutions were St Andrews, Robert Gordon at Aberdeen and New Battle Abbey College. Nine out of the ten Alliance students who studied abroad are thought to have been enrolled in Scottish colleges or universities.
