Education Theme Analysis

In Petals of Blood, there is no such thing as an apolitical education. A person’s education shapes how they think, so education is fundamentally important to politics. The novel illustrates the political nature of education through the boys’ boarding school, Siriana, which several major characters attend, including Munira and Chui. Munira and Chui attend Siriana together prior to Kenya’s independence. Their first British headmaster is fond of (if condescending to) the Kenyan students. Yet the novel suggests that under this headmaster, Siriana’s curriculum focuses exclusively on European writers and European sports—a focus that teaches the Kenyan students that Europe is the center of the world and that they should try to act European. This implicit teaching illustrates how a school’s curriculum signals what a school thinks is important—and thus carries a political message. Siriana’s next British headmaster, Fraudsham, is more overtly racist: he won’t let the students wear European clothes or wear shoes except to church and forces them to eat dirty food because he believes they should be not “black Europeans but true Africans.” In protest, Chui and Munira lead a student strike and are expelled. Their protest shows self-respect: Fraudsham’s definition of “true Africans” is false and racist. Yet Munira and Chui seem outraged in part because Fraudsham claims they can’t act European—which suggests that Siriana’s implicit political curriculum has caused them to internalize Europe-centric attitudes and values.

Neither Chui nor Munira develops beyond the Europe-centric attitudes and values they learn at Siriana. After Fraudsham retires as headmaster, Chui replaces him—and refuses the students’ demands for an Africa-centric curriculum, requiring that the students read only English writers and learn only European history. When the students strike in protest, he expels the ten ringleaders, including budding political activist Karega. Much later, when Munira and Karega are teaching at the same school, Munira targets Karega for talking to the students about “blackness” and “African peoples” and eventually gets him fired. Though Munira has a personal motive for hurting Karega—Karega is involved with Munira’s former lover Wanja—the means he uses to attack Karega suggest that he, like Chui, permanently internalized Siriana’s Europe-centric values. Chui and Munira’s failure to move beyond their early education’s damaging political content suggests a bad education can permanently warp people’s political consciousness—so a good, politically informed educational system is necessary for political progress.