History was my favourite subject in high school…still is. I lived and breathed it. That, and literature. I was so intrigued by the reality that a teacher would come to class, tell us a bunch of stories, real stories or in the case of literature, grounded on some truth…then quiz us about it. Is this it, education? Well, chemistry would quickly bring me back to the atrocity that is the formal education system.

I liked my history teacher, he looked the part too. He’s a teacher of the subject “History” if I’ve ever seen one… with his Mufasa hats, at least that’s what I called them. He did not read us books, he narrated stories…brought them to life. You know those little illustrations they put on textbooks to help students visualize concepts, well…I could literally see them jump off the page.

I could see the Giriama woman Mekatilili wa Menza doing some wonder woman shit, just as well as I could picture Laibon Lenana giving away his people’s land for a pair of shoes, or a mirror, or something cheap like that. PSA…this is not a dig on leaders who chose to collaborate with the colonisers, God knows this is a battle they would have lost…even if they had won, lives lost could never be replaced. There’s a price for Freedom, and sometimes…it is simply too high. This begs the question, when did freedom become a commodity that someone can take away and force you to buy back?

So, why am I all of a sudden obsessed with history? Because I’ve recently been hit by the reality that what I know can’t be it. Kenyan history…pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial is covered in just but a few chapters and I find it hard to believe that that’s all there is to it. Please explain to me why the British House of Lords is something that Kenyan students are taught and tested on when they have no concept of what life was like for Kenyans working on settler farms…the reality of slavery on land that they owned. Why do we learn details of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and somehow brush over what happened on our own soil, where people were not moved in ships but simply held hostage on terrain they knew all too well?

February is Black History Month in the U.S. and I’ve been inspired to see people say names of heroes long forgotten…tell stories that rightly honour the people who started the revolution. Can’t we do the same for our Father and Mothers who fought for us to have Uhuru, though in the words of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, “It’s not yet Uhuru.” and those words couldn’t be more true in 2025, sadly.

But could it be that we’ll never be truly free when we continue to build a nation on the systems of oppression we fought so hard to get away from? Could it be that we’ll never know and learn from history when we stuff our children with material written by the oppressor?

How can our books honour Freedom Fighters without condemning the one who brought the shackles? Does that sound like a complete story to you? Is our history half-baked or did someone intentionally shut down the oven?

Let me play devil’s advocate here and assume that the curriculum and all who are involved in its development are so worried about scarring our feeble teenage minds…we’re already dealing with so much at that age…puberty, crushes, PAS (parental annoyance syndrome)…you know…the usual.

We’re grown now! Give us the real tea.

Oh, I forgot…I’m an adult now…if I want something done, I gotta do it myself.

So…I’m going on a journey…to rewrite Kenyan History, because in the brilliant words of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie…

 “Stories can take away dignity, stories can also restore dignity.”