Njathi wa Kabui
Last week I attended a graduation of an important person in my family. I noticed that the parking lot was full of clean and expensive cars. It would have been unimaginable for such a festive celebration to celebrate 8 years of schooling during my time. I can remember the last day I finished my high school exam. My celebration, if you would call it that, was to do what I had always done at the end of each session. I left the city for my family farm in the village. I would spend the holiday with my mother helping out at the farm. I would also immediately reconnect with eating food we had grown ourselves. But that was then.
I parked my car and proceeded to the auditorium. Upon entering the auditorium, the importance of the occasion was made very clear from the sartorial code observed by the students, occupying the center stage. Parents, teachers, and other supporters were filling the seats, anticipating the graduation ceremony. The excitement was palpable.
But it was not the center stage that got my interest. Rather it was a long and well decorated table, conveniently placed near the back wall, directly facing the podium. The graduates sat in front of the podium and the parents occupied the sides and the back. Essentially, the long table was situated behind the parents. I really liked the set up.
But when I went for a closer look, I noticed that the well-decorated table had nothing on it except neatly sliced pieces of cake, on decorated paper plates.
My stomach churned. I wondered what kind of education system we are putting those students through. It was the clearest sign that such an education system is obviously divorced from reality. There is a health epidemic in this country as in much of the globe. The world is in the midst of a long pandemic, where almost an equal number of people are suffering from the crises of too little and too many calories. You would think that such a problem would be the easiest one to solve. All those eating too much would have to do is ship the those calories to those who would gladly relieve them of their surplus. But the solution is not so simple. To believe otherwise would be both naive and woefully misinformed.
One aspect of the problem we have at hand exists in a blind spot. The other stems from our Western national identity. We thrive on fallacies that, once debunked, would pull down the foundation of who we are. That is not easy for anyone. We might just realize that we are not be as powerful as we want to think, nor as just as we assume that we are.
Learning takes humility. A lot of people outside of the U.S and the western model are suffering, just so that we might enjoy cheap resources such as oil and manufactured goods. The biggest impact of our insistence of being the center of consumption in the world is that our health has become cheap. In other words, exporting dollars, manufacturing and weapons has left us vulnerable. Eating poorly is the price we have had to pay for being a super power. In the end, we all are becoming losers. Those who are exploited for our comfort become twice poor, as they have less resources. Such victims imagine that if only they touched the hem of our garment, they would be whole again.
We “first-worlders” too, become poor twice, by killing our industries and our farms on one hand, and we become the Republic of Poor health, divided and depressed.
How can we teach children about everything else and not teach them about food? What kind of education failed to teach these children to avoid the truck that is coming their way, head on? The lifestyle diseases that America, and most of the “advantaged” world experience today, are tied to food, directly or indirectly. But our education system, intentionally or unintentionally ignoring food literacy as a foundation of essential general and cultural knowledge, is nothing short of subtle suicide.
As I stood behind the students and the long table of cake slices, I remembered the story of Julius Caesar, the one man who changed Rome from a republic to an empire. In 44 B.C., Brutus and his comrades stabbed his step uncle and his benefactor. All Julius Cesar, is reputed to have said was “Even you, Brutus?
How appropriate was it to have the cakes behind the graduating class. I couldn’t resist making the connection between the desert and the daggers that ended both the life of the first Roman emperor, and the friendship between Brutus and Caesar, not to mention the other accomplices. That betrayal sealed the fate of Rome, and its metamorphosis into some holy empire.
In 2023, the Afro Futuristic spirit in me silently asked our trusted western educational vanguards, even you, Brutal adults?