This might at first sight seem like a nostalgia piece. It is not. Nor has it anything to do with conductive education. Though you may learn something of my very early career in teaching from it and some hint of the inspiration that drives me still today at Paces.
My singular aim in posting this in my blog is the very remote chance that someone, sometime, googling the name of a great Kenya educator and Headteacher, Mzee Peter Chiera, might find this by chance and, by it, be led to add their own recollections on a wiki I set up some time ago, which has remained obstinately shy of visitors, and from which the following is taken.
If you, however, at some remote future time, should be a chance visitor to this weblog, looking for Mzee Chiera, please do go to the wiki in his honour and add your memories.MZEE PETER CHIERA
This wiki is a place to celebrate the life and work of a great Kenyan community educator, Peter Chiera.
Anyone who knew and respected this remarkable teacher is invited to add to these pages.
Please write in any language you choose.
Please feel free to add to these pages.
In January 1970, a young English teacher arrived at Kirimara School. With him was his young wife. It was late at night, dark, and the journey from Nairobi in a Peugeot 404 had seemed a very long one. The driver was Mr Samuel Wanjohi, the Deputy Head Teacher who had come to meet them at the airport. Gathered in the darkness, pupils and staff came to greet the new teacher. The night air was still very hot. Surrounded by strangers, home seemed a long way away. The young teacher was shown to his new home. There was food and tea. Best of all there was a bed and the promise of much needed sleep.
Forty years later, the young English teacher is himself nearing the end of his caeer. Memory fades. He is managing a large community centre and a school for disabled children. It is, he likes to think, an "Harambee" centre. He often thinks of Mr Chiera. He was a bachelor. They said he was married to his school. The English teacher knows what they meant. Although he has children and grandchildren, it sometimes seems to him that he too is married to his centre, so much is it part of his life. Some days, when there is a difficult problem, he wonders what Mr Chiera would have done. The Mzee was an inspiration.
The next day after we arrived we met the Headmaster, Mr Peter Chiera. He seemed at the same time very serious and yet very friendly. He drove us to Nyeri in his VW Beetle. There was some official business to be done, as I remember. He took us for a cup of chai somewhere, I forget where. I do remember he laughed when we thanked him. He said that we should not thank him. It was his duty as a host. He said there was no word for thank you in Kikuyu. Can that be true? Even now I am not sure.
He seemed to me, then, about 50 years old. If so, he would have been born about 1920. He was old enough to have been my father. I now know that he died some years ago, though I do not know when. I do not think he married but he remained all his life a bachelor. I do not remember ever meeting any brothers or sisters nor other family of his.
Where was Peter Chiera born? Where was his family from? Where did he live before Kirimara School? He was, I seem to remember, a personal friend of Professor Ali Mazrui . There is much we need to know of Peter Chiera's life.What stories do you have about him?
The story that I tell goes something like this.
At the time of the struggle for Kenya independence, surrounded by war, Peter Chiera decided to set up an harambee primary school. So he did that. When he persuaded the Government to take over paying for the primary school, he decided to move on and set up an harambee secondary school - Kirimara School. So he did that. When he persuaded the government to take over paying for the secondary school, he decided he needed a Sixth Form. By then it was 1970, and as a young English teacher, I came to Kirimara School to help set up the first Sixth Form and Library. Peter Chiera was already talking with Makerere University in Kampala about setting up an outreach college for local students who could not attend the university in Kampala. I do not know if he ever succeeded in this last ambition. In any event, Idi Amin exiled his friend Ali Mazrui around 1973, so perhaps he lost contact with the University. But his School remains, a legacy to young people today.
That is the story I tell as I remember it. How true it really is, I no longer know. Memory fades.
Yet there is, I believe, a remarkable Truth in the story I tell of him: of a man of vision, of determination, of courage, and of a commitment to the education of young people - and a man who was all these things. He was not always an easy man or Headmaster. As those who are driven by a Vision often are not. That story has inspired my own vision and lifted me when the struggle has been hard, in my own work.
What do you know of Peter Chiera, teacher, Headmaster, community educator?Teachers 1970-73
When I came to Kirimara School, these were the teachers that I remember being on the staff:
Mr Samuel Wanjohi, the Deputy Head Teacher
Mr Geoffrey Kuira
Mr John Karanja
Mr Samuel Warui.
A few days after I arrived, there came another Englishman, a geography teacher, from Uganda:
Mr Brian Mottram
There were some other teachers who came and left. One was:
Mr Adolph Chikasha was a Zimbabwean. (Could this be the very same Adolph Chikasha? )
Where are they now? What stories they could tell of Mzee Peter Chiera?
I myself left Kirimara, with my family, in July 1973. By then, I had a beautiful baby daughter, Karen, born in Nanyuki. I went home, to Bangor University in North Wales, UK where I did a Masters Degree.
After that, I returned to Kenya, to Garba Tula, to help build the national school there. Sadly it closed in the 1990s. I do not know why.