February 9, 2005: Headlines: COS - Kenya: Writing - Kenya: BBC Monitoring Africa: Kenyan Writer Oduor Ong'wen says: When I was a high school student, an American Peace Corps Volunteer named Cletus Gassman was posted to our school to teach Literature in English
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February 9, 2005: Headlines: COS - Kenya: Writing - Kenya: BBC Monitoring Africa: Kenyan Writer Oduor Ong'wen says: When I was a high school student, an American Peace Corps Volunteer named Cletus Gassman was posted to our school to teach Literature in English
Kenyan Writer Oduor Ong'wen says: When I was a high school student, an American Peace Corps Volunteer named Cletus Gassman was posted to our school to teach Literature in English
Kenyan Writer Oduor Ong'wen says: When I was a high school student, an American Peace Corps Volunteer named Cletus Gassman was posted to our school to teach Literature in English
When I was a high school student, an American Peace Corps Volunteer named Cletus Gassman was posted to our school to teach Literature in English
[Excerpt]
When I was a high school student, an American Peace Corps Volunteer named Cletus Gassman was posted to our school to teach Literature in English.
The set books included Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between, Peter Abraham's Mine Boy, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Wole Soyinka's The Lion and the Jewel.
The only one by non-African author was the Animal Farm by George Orwell.
Teacher Gassman had a good collection of classics ranging from Shakespeare to Charles Dickens to T. S. Elliot.
But his favourite book was Nicolai Gogol's The Government Inspector.
Gassman would often digress from his lessons to talk about this Gogol's character, who was mistaken to be a Ringera in pre- Bolshevik Russia, travelling incognito to catch some mafias or marionettes before they had had enough of Oxfam lunches and began covering diplomats' shiny shoes with the contents of their bowels.
The volunteer also encouraged his students to read widely.
Apart from being very good at delivery in his lessons, Gassman was also very social and would come to chat with students on Saturday afternoons as we whiled away time either reading under trees or just lazily whiling away the weekends. One such afternoon, Gassman found me reading Ngugi's A Grain of Wheat. I thought he would congratulate me for taking his advice seriously to read beyond what examiners had prescribed. He was not amused.
He lectured me on the dangers of reading African writers. They would "confuse" my young mind with their "monotonous anti- civilisation tirades and collections of village gossip, witchcraft and ritual killings," the American volunteer advised.
Having grown up in the immediate post-independence years, the fire of patriotism and anti-colonial vision had been lit inside me.
I refused to take in the paternalistic lecture and the attempt to denigrate the culture of my people.
I do not recall the exact words I used against him, but I know that the next day I was punished for "insulting" a teacher. It was said that I had called him a racist.
That marked the end of my literature classes. I never went back. It happened it was just the week before we enrolled for 'O' Level examinations. In spite of persuasions from my class teacher and the headmaster, who tried to convince me that I was making a fatal mistake since I was destined for a distinction grade, I stood my ground and never enrolled for the literature exams. Gassman left at the end of that term after teaching only two school terms. But it was too late to undo the damage. From that incidence on, I've never taken kindly to any patronising sermons from foreigners.
When this story was posted in February 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:
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Story Source: BBC Monitoring Africa
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Kenya; Writing - Kenya
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