In 1924, Dr Norman Leys warned that the programme of education in colonial Kenya was ill-conceived, saying that it was quite wrong to use schools merely to indoctrinate the quality and train everyone else for labour. British values of liberty and honour had been fostered by the leisure to read classic literature, and Africans deserved no less.

Leys developed his point, comparing the Kenyan curriculum with the blinkered ideology of Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind. He argued that Africans both needed and wanted an education which enlarged both mind and heart, and went so far as to say that even colonial greed was not as serious a threat to Kenyans as failing to satisfy their appetite for free inquiry.

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