I was writing something about the political and cultural work of the boast #IWentToAlliance when I saw the news about the Principal of Alliance Girls’ High School. She is about to face disciplinary action over an unauthorized fee hike. My first thought was: Why now? Because I know from my experience as a guardian at that school in the 1990s that this is not the first time its management has heaped dubious and grossly exaggerated amounts onto the official annual school fees.
My next thought was: Why her? Because in recent years I have seen, time and again on social media, complaints from parents of various public schools after they are hit with wild demands for additional monies to be paid for outlandish co-curricular activities. Some of those activities seem to be tailored solely for the enjoyment of teachers.
As I unpacked probable underpinnings in the timing and focus of this looming disciplinary action, it occurred to me that the practice of necropolitics is seamlessly accelerated wherever misogyny thrives.
You all know misogyny, and its particularly virulent cousin misogynoir. You know how easily women, and particularly women of colour, are isolated. How (invented) traditions and modern religions collude with politics to topple women in public spaces. How women are ridiculed and turned into cautionary tales for engaging in social practices that are widespread across the body politic, but which are somehow framed as natural or acceptable when they are staged by men. Indeed, you already know how years of conditioning result in patriarchy being upheld by women whose unwitting endorsement is used by men to fan misogyny.
But, I hear many of you ask, what is necropolitics? Literally, it means the politics of death, or of the dead— if you want to be more exact. Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian political theorist, coined the term necropolitics in 2003 as an extension of Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower. By biopower, Foucault means the ways in which modern states manage and control the populace through policies that determine health, reproduction, mortality.
Power is wielded not just through a set of laws which punish errant behaviour, but also through the quotidian ways in which we are conditioned to relate with each other and with institutions. And, overtly and covertly, states engineer how people live. Schools are part of the states management and control design since it is in and through schools that the population is trained to be obedient and productive.
Mbembe extends Foucault’s biopower argument so that it encompasses the use of social and political power “to dictate who is able to live and who must die” (2019:66). In the eyes of a government, who are the disposable populations, the ones they allow to die? What conditions are created or otherwise tolerated to make life in some spaces so tenuous as to turn the inhabitants there into “the living dead”?
This theory of necropolitics alerts us to the idea that sovereignty is about the power to kill— to obliterate populations, whether in the banal ways of neglect or in the horrific ways of violent genocide. And yes, necropolitics, it seems to me, is also about the use of wanton power to strangle institutions. Necropolitics functions where Frantz Fanon’s notion of care has been abandoned; in worlds where the goal of excluding, enslaving, erasing, takes the place of supporting humane community and trying to build a more just world.
Ili Iwe Funzo …?
Circling back to the charges the Principal of Alliance Girls’ High School is facing, what is being put to death here? Is it the corrupt ways of all those head teachers in our public schools who have turned fee-collection into a vehicle for the enrichment of Board members and a tool for the containment of teachers through gratuitous treats?
Is the punishment of one principal supposed to serve as an example, or a threat, of what may befall everyone else who may have done what she is accused of doing? Can justice be served via proxy? Can widespread errant practices, which have morphed into the given way, be upended by isolating just one soft target for reprisals?
What is being put to death here? Is it the prestige that a particular school has enjoyed for a century? How that prestige was established and sustained is a story for another day. Suffice it to say here that the school’s prestige is manifest in several ways. Its vintage status, being as it is 78-years-old. Its performance in national examinations (whether— or not— that is achieved on account of some examiners also being teachers at the school). The public offices, to say nothing of the local and international corporate positions, held by the school’s alumni. Facilities— the number and the types of buildings. The considerable physical span of 71 acres. Indeed, Alliance Girls’ High School has a stature and legacy that stretches in many elevated directions.
How does one kill such a legacy?
Death, as we know is not an event, it is a process. The dying body is afflicted, it fights however briefly; it may recover some functions while it loses one maybe two, and then that loss compounds into other compromises, damages, inabilities, morbidities … until all life ebbs out— in a sudden fit, or in a long drawn out struggle whose end is certain even if the time and date may remain a mystery.
A potentially fatal blow has been struck in the pointed direction of an old and revered institution— whatever quirks, inadequacies, and crimes may exist within it. What remains to be seen is how this blow will morph into concessions. Anyone who expected the Board of Management to remain standing was expecting a gangrenous foot to maintain normal blood pressure throughout the body. When a foot is amputated, it invariably takes much of the leg with it.
What has started as the strangling of the school’s management— however deserved— may very soon lead to annexation. And whether that happens gradually or slowly depends on many other moving parts including the strength of the alumni in the face of a necropolitics that cannibalizes everything that represents the old order, and an establishment that is not immune to misogyny.
And remember, once again, the ongoing outbreak of cannibalizing institutions is being enacted not so much to decolonize in ways that rinse this republic of every last vestige of classism and broaden access, but in the aggrandizing ways of Jomo Kenyatta. For it was Jomo who turned independence into a farce in which the new masters dashed to build a personality cult as they gorged themselves on every material thing that the colonizer had annexed for white occupation.
I fear we are watching Alliance Girls’ High School’s death by a thousand cuts creep in— a contrived and harsh trial in the court of public opinion; faded glory aka loss of reputation; transfer/exodus of teachers; dwindling performance from music to sports to science; physical decay; forced eviction or legalized annexation which is the ancient disease of lust for land that was inflicted on us by the British.
As we wait for this script to unfold, let us sit knowing that necropolitics spares no population really. He who holds the yam and the knife decides not only who eats, but also what institutions to grab.
In the process, history is strangled along with identities. Because when sites of becoming and ways of being are under attack in a manner that will not broaden public access to national resources, one which will instead colonize every semi-productive space, institution, and being, death comes to all of us. Gradually. Eventually.
In such circumstances, what do resistance and redemption look like?
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This piece made me think about how death reorganizes power. Suddenly families fracture, politicians arrive, churches dictate ritual, WhatsApp groups awaken, contributions begin, narratives get rewritten. The dead body becomes a site onto which society projects class, morality, belonging, even nationalism.What struck me the most also was how death in Kenya is rarely private. It becomes spectacle, obligation, performance, politics, debt, memory, and sometimes even competition. We mourn loudly in public yet struggle to sit quietly with grief itself. I keep wondering whether funerals in our society are more for the living than the dead.
I loved this😍
Thank you Joyce. Great thought provoking article here. AGHS is not unique in the current predicament . There is Kenya High School too among other national schools. The hubris in the court of public opinion can at sometimes silence people from asking key questions and even if asked, no one hears them or they appear no different from the noise. This noise could even come from paid mobs from either side of the divide
What has come to my mind is.......What's the leadership and governance structure at AGHS ? What are the guard rails and who controls the levers ?
The school head did not come up with these figures. The BOM must have been involved and yet in the court of public opinion, she appears to be alone in this crisis. There must have been meetings etc to duscuss these numbers.
Finally, in meetings there are those who get an opportunity to speak. From those who speak,there are those who are believed and there are those who speak and the eye rolls from other member cause a defeaning noise. There are also those who are silenced and note that the silenced ones could include those who got to speak. The outcome of such meetings lies in hands of who is controlling the levers and this may not necessarily be the chap who bears the full weight of responsibility when things go berry up. This thing at AGHS is crazy and dare I say that the practice is repeated in almost every national school in Kenya with the support of some ministry official.
Thank you again Joyce.