Between Empire and Agency: African Autobiographies and Schools as Sites of Struggle in Colonial Kenya

This article pulls from over two dozen African-authored autobiographies to reconstruct the ways African students and teachers struggled to assert their agency in Kenya’s colonial schools from the early 1900s until the early 1960s. By conceptualising schools as sites of struggle and negotiation, this article illuminates the challenges, nuances, and complexities of African life under empire, while also highlighting the ways Africans in colonial Kenya transformed schools and their environs into liminal spaces between empire and agency. Centring these African-authored sources calls attention to both the limits and possibilities of African assertions of agency under British colonial hegemony, contributes to the work of scholars who have sought to create shared histories of Kenya, and helps to Africanise the history of Kenyan schools.