That’s how the informal discussions we’ve been hosting each Tuesday afternoon at our flat have often ended. The “Philosophy Students’ Tea,” open to any philosophy student at Daystar and not just the 53 in my section, runs from 3:30 to 4:30, according to my poster. In reality, the first students once showed up as early as 3:30 (that was a shock—we weren’t ready), more often 15 or 20 minutes later, usually in small groups that meet on campus and arrive together. Others drop in after other commitments a half-hour or an hour later, and they usually stay till 5:30—any later and they would be traveling home in the dark, which is riskier and more costly. So far as I know we haven’t had participants from the other sections, but some guests interested in philosophy have accompanied their friends.
These discussions have been a highlight of my semester. Invariably the students come with a number of questions already formulated. Numbers have varied from 7 or 8 to 15. They shake my hand and Susan’s if we are standing near the door, then shake everyone else’s. But if we are already sitting, they often take a seat without any formal greeting—rather brash of them by Kenyan standards, but also a sign that they have come to feel at home here. No one takes a cup of tea or a glass of iced tea til invited, but then they help themselves and go back for more. No matter how few are present, two large plates of biscuits disappear rapidly, the men taking them by the fistful.
I still remember the three questions that began our very first session, months ago:
Student #1: “Sir, I received a zero in my first written essay because it was copied from the Internet, but is it true that I will have an opportunity to submit a fifth essay in order to make up for that one?” (This was indeed what I had announced.) I was stunned: I can’t imagine an American student ever owning up to being caught cheating in front of a group of other students, making no excuses, and simply asking for clarification of the penalty imposed.
Plagiarism in assigned essays has been a persistent and perplexing problem for me and for others at Daystar, I’m sorry to say. I’m doing some consulting with the Deputy Vice Chancellor, who gave faculty photocopies of relevant sections of my book, Campus Rules and Moral Community, as a basis for discussion. Its sources are complex: not just laziness but also pressure from parents to perform well, astronomical unemployment levels even for university graduates, and an academic culture in which exams containing rote repetition of dictated lectures often get top marks. (One interesting contrast: I don’t think I’ve ever confronted an American student about cheating without eliciting a string of elaborate explanations and excuses; but each time I’ve personally confronted one of my Kenyan students, he or she has responded either with respectful silence or with an apology.)
Student #2: “Professor, you said that philosophy should not be seen as an enemy of Christian faith but as a means to understand more fully what we believe. But isn’t Gnosticism an example of philosophy leading Christians into error?” I was equally surprised, for quite different reasons: this was a thoughtful and sophisticated response to our first few weeks’ discussion of ancient Greek and early Christian traditions.
Student #3: “Excuse me, but can you tell me your recipe for this iced tea? It’s so much better than the iced tea my mother makes at home.” Not quite what I was expecting either. In fact Susan had spotted a brand-new product on the Kenyan market, a Nestea powdered flavored tea that we find far too sweet but that evidently appeals to the Kenyan palate. Hot tea here is invariably served with hot milk, in the English fashion, and many of our Kenyan friends dump in several teaspoons of sugar as well.
In the first few weeks, many of the questions centered on theological and cultural issues. Homosexuality is much on the minds of my students—I never brought it up, but students had lots of questions. What most of them hear in church and from parents and other authorities is straightforward: this is a scourge on society that Christians must condemn and root out, and all homosexuals must forsake their wickedness and become heterosexual to escape God’s wrath. Students aren’t satisfied with this, however, and were very interested in hearing more about the range of positions taken by Christians in Europe and North America.
Evolution came up repeatedly too. Can a Christian affirm the evolution of new species without rubbishing the message of the Bible (in the vivid Kenyan phrase)? When I asked what they had been taught in their secondary school biology classes, nearly all said, “We never talked about evolution,” whether they had attended government or private Christian schools. (None of the students at that session had taken a biology course at Daystar, so I didn’t get a clear reading on how such matters are handled here.) We tried to press them gently: Doesn’t God work through natural processes, both now and in the past? Why are there several stories of creation in the Bible (in Genesis, the Psalms, the epistles), and what is each intended to tell us?
This would often get us into issues of Biblical hermeneutics. One week several students argued forcefully that, if you buy the secular notion that part of Isaiah is post-exilic, you are treating the Bible as nothing more than a human creation—one containing “prophecies” of events already past in order to trick the reader. Susan and I, and a few students as well, challenged them. Shouldn’t we use all the tools we have—historical and cultural and linguistic—to understand the Bible more fully? If both content and style suggest that some of the pastoral epistles attributed to Paul were written after his death, can they still speak God’s Word to us? (One of the books I brought with me to read and leave behind is Raymond Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament, and I had just read his overview of Pauline authorship issues.) The students who raised the issue yielded little ground but engaged in a lively debate.
On another occasion, one student arrived with a whole series of direct challenges to Christian belief, some of them adapted from our Hume and Nietzsche readings, and set them off one after another like firecrackers. The students were so quick to respond, and so eloquent in their testimony to the presence of God in their lives, that Susan and I sat back and listened in admiration. It was never clear whether the critic was speaking for himself or just trying out positions he did not affirm. What was abundantly clear is that, for most of these students, Christian faith is not a matter of superficial affirmation but the energizing core of their lives.
These discussions drew students out into territory that they haven’t been encouraged to explore, it appears. Most of them have grown up in something of a cultural and religious bubble. When I went around the room asking “where do you worship?” about four out of five named a Pentecostal fellowship; one was an Anglican, one a Presbyterian. One admitted, with some embarrassment, “It’s been quite a while since I went to church.” They all value the Christian environment at Daystar, but some chafe at its restrictions: a very strict drinking policy (first offense means suspension), little toleration of challenges by many lecturers, a dress code that imposes a few restrictions on men and lots of rules on women.
There were also interesting questions on other matters, from the practical to the abstract. Do you really have a hundred philosophy majors at your university? What jobs will they find when they graduate? Were all your philosophy teachers Christian? Did we hear you correctly when you said in class that Christian philosophers and Moslem philosophers used to study each other’s writings? How can there be Moslem philosophers—isn’t their religion just a strict set of rules? Do American students really own their own cars? Do you ever have post-election violence like Kenya’s in America? How do you keep from freezing to death when the temperature is below zero (Celsius)? Are there any African-Americans in Michigan? And so forth.
Most of my students are urban Kenyans whose daily lives are now rather distant from the villages of their grandparents. My only non-African student, a Korean, dropped the course early on. I know of a couple of Ugandans and Tanzanians, and one Sudanese refugee, and there may be a few more. There are a few American exchange students out at Athi River, but I’ve never seen any on the Nairobi campus.
One day as we prepared to discuss African philosophy I asked how many are fluent in their grandparents’ mother tongue. Only one hand in ten went up. Then I asked how many had lived for several years of their lives in a village without electricity or piped water, and the number was about the same. But one student asked, “Does it have to be several years continuously?” OK, I said: how many have lived in such a village for a month or more, on several different occasions? This time about one-third said yes.
I’ve heard comments from other visiting faculty that university students in Nairobi have an ambivalent attitude toward their roots. Life in the village was beautiful and harmonious and happy—for grandpa and grandma. But you’ll never find me living in such poverty and filth. There are cars in my future, not cows. I want a salary, not a shamba (a plot for crops). The wisdom and the ways of traditional Africa have nothing of value for me.
But my students didn’t conform to this pattern at all. I had asked them to identify philosophical ideas or insights from their African community that they had learned from family members or others in their assigned essays, then to compare notes in small groups during class and share what they learned. Each designated reporter spoke passionately about how much importance the members of the group place on central elements of their African heritage—its understanding of God, of morality, of fellowship with the ancestors, of initiation and marriage and elderhood, of how we should care for each other. Students who are Luo described their own customs, then those of classmates who are Kikuyu or Pokuot or Kalenjin or Kamba or Luhya. One reporter took a contrarian view: her group decided that African wisdom isn’t at all philosophical, she said, because there’s no tradition of dialogue and critique, only preservation of the past. Her group members agree that they have learned a great deal from their ethnic traditions, but they don’t want to call any of it philosophy.
From time to time a remark would spark a quick response. “Well, you see, the Kamba are rather promiscuous,” said one student, to which another responded immediately: “No, we are not promiscuous! But unlike other tribes we allow couples to live together and have children if they have their families’ permission, then pay the cows and hold the marriage ceremony later. That’s why people say we are promiscuous.”
I had told the students at the beginning of class that this week they would be my teachers, and as they spoke I made lists on the board of common themes, areas of difference, and links to philosophers we had studied.
Soon I had a list of common elements that approximated the chapter headings of any number of books on traditional African thought. The dissenting group, on the other hand, spoke for some contemporary African philosophers (Paulin Houtondji, Kwasi Wiredu) who draw a sharp line between folk morality and philosophical reflection.
Soon I had a list of common elements that approximated the chapter headings of any number of books on traditional African thought. The dissenting group, on the other hand, spoke for some contemporary African philosophers (Paulin Houtondji, Kwasi Wiredu) who draw a sharp line between folk morality and philosophical reflection.
The links that students made to Western philosophers we had studied were often insightful. Some quoted proverbs that, they thought, echoed Hume’s advice to make judgments based on evidence and not on what others say. Others noted the parallel between Augustine’s observation that all human hearts long to know God and the universal African recognition of a supreme God. Several compared their traditions’ standard of morality—not a set of rules, but a sense for what is proper that requires both wisdom and long experience—to Aristotle’s account of practical reason and moral virtue.
After that class I was exhilarated, and I felt as if all my work in the class had borne fruit. I knew I was asking much more of students than they were expecting to do, demanding that they not just learn about philosophy but also think philosophically, but they rose to the challenge. (I won’t get into any details about the other Philosophy 111 sections here, but my students told me they could not believe how different they are from ours.) And the discussion at tea that afternoon offered more of the same, which Susan could enjoy along with me: perceptive and candid explorations of what it means to hold onto one’s African identity while facing new challenges.
From week to week I’ve seen the students becoming more enthusiastic about what they are learning, more active in raising questions and challenges in class, more eager to throw their questions into the afternoon discussions. At our first few “philosophy teas” there were some silences that I filled by asking students leading questions. At the last few, the students were talking constantly—over each other, sometimes, though they are usually very courteous to me and to each other. Often things got so lively that I had to ask students to slow down and speak one at a time.
I’ve learned so much about the challenges they face—the way that their lives, even if more sheltered in some ways than those of my Calvin students, are far more difficult in others. To begin with, nearly all of the students here in Nairobi (unlike those at the remote Athi River campus) live at home with their parents, and possibly grandparents and cousins as well. Travel to campus means catching a bus or matatu, perhaps several in succession, a journey that can take several hours each way. One always cheerful woman student, very faithful in attendance and insightful in her essays, lives on her own with her two young children. (She appears to be the same age as most other students, on either side of 20, but I don’t trust my age estimates very much here.) For each student who catches a bus from a well-appointed Nairobi flat, I suspect, another walks half an hour on a muddy track from a slum dwelling to the nearest tarred road where she can catch a matatu.
One student with a West African and a Kenyan parent told our very last afternoon group this week about her experiences after, at age 13, she moved with her family to escape a simmering civil war back home in West Africa, where her father had an important political appointment. One afternoon two years after the move, while she and her parents and siblings were in their car on Ngong Road (the road that runs past our flat), some men jumped out of a car that was following them and murdered her father in front of his family, settling some sort of political grievance from back home. Five years later, her oldest brother met the very same fate, also at midday, on a nearby road. The first murder, she said, was reported in the newspapers. But the second was never in the news, for fear that any announcement would simply trigger more killings in the civil war that is still being waged thousands of miles from its origin.
I wish I could somehow capture in words the irrepressibly warm and joyful spirit of the young woman who related this horrifying tale. From the start she’s been eager and engaged in class, responsive to others, and fascinated by the unfamiliar ideas we have discussed. And there are so many like her! By no means all, of course: of the 53 students currently enrolled, perhaps a quarter have done consistently mediocre work on essays and tests, and they sat mutely in class and dutifully taking notes when they weren’t slipping out to take (or make) a mobile phone call. They often arrived late, often left early, but always made sure they signed the attendance record (required by Daystar policy). These students are not putting much into the class and not getting much out of it. But unlike their American counterparts, they are invariably respectful and attentive, and if I meet them on the campus or after chapel they smile and extend a hand in greeting. (I’ve managed to learn most of my students’ names, which is a challenge, not only because of the large class but because most students have three or more names and use different ones in different circumstances. Not to mention that there are four Elizabeths and three Lawrences and two Keziahs.)
But the students at the other end of the Bell curve are a delight to teach and to interact with outside class. They evidently talk together in groups before coming to tea, often with questions they have divided up among themselves. And often, as our discussion comes to an end, it becomes clear that one of them has volunteered to give the “vote of thanks” mentioned in my heading. He or she will speak rather formally on behalf of all the students, thanking the professor and Mrs. Hoekema for the tea and biscuits, the conversation, and the hospitality. And then the same student, or another, sometimes volunteers to lead in a closing prayer.
I’ve come to love these students, and after giving my last lecture this week each remaining Tuesday will seem empty. I wish I could take ten or fifteen back with me to Calvin—what fun it would be to teach a 200-level course with half Kenyan and half American students enrolled! And many of them want to take another philosophy course, even though they cannot do so at Daystar. One of them had a solution to suggest: “Professor, you must come back next year and teach a different philosophy course! At the beginning of term I was very afraid of philosophy, and I thought this would be my worst class, but it has turned out to be my best, and I am sorry it is finished!”
On days like that, teaching philosophy is about the best job I can imagine having.
