Southern Drawl

According to Kimani Ng'ang'a Maruge, “the power is in the pen.” Very few, if any, might recognize Maruge’s name, but he holds an important distinction in The Guinness Book of World Records. His accomplishment was featured in the recent movie The First Grader, produced by National Geographic.

To get a sense of Maruge’s history, one has to go back to Kenyan history. In the 1950s, the Kikiyu, an indigenous tribe in Kenya, revolted against British colonial rule. The anti-colonial nationalist fighters, known by some as Mau Mau, likely an anagram of the Kenyan phrase “get out get out,” fought to retain native owned Kenyan lands against the British, and, as a result, suffered terrible torture and punishment at the hands of the British.

The conflict was the precursor for Kenya’s independence, which came in 1963. The campaign for free public primary education accompanied this independence, but in the 1980s, the government adopted several cost-sharing measures, including fees for textbooks and extracurricular activities.

In 2003, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki re-introduced free primary education. President Bill Clinton commended Kibabi in an ABC News interview with Peter Jennings, naming him as the one living person he would most like to meet “because of the Kenyan government's decision to abolish school fees for primary education,” suggesting that Kibaki had taken on a challenge that would impact more citizens than any other president that year. 1.7 million additional students enrolled in school in Kenya that year, and in the summer of 2005, Clinton and Kibaki met.

One of those students was Kimani Ng'ang'a Maruge. However, Maruge was no ordinary six or seven year old. Maruge, a Kikiyu, was a veteran of the Mau Mau liberation. On January 12, 2004, Maruge, presumed to be 84 years old, set the record for oldest person to enroll in primary school. He had no papers to document his age but believed himself to have been born in 1920.

The film, based on Maruge’s quest, reveals both the Kenyan struggle and Maruge’s own personal struggle. At first, he has to convince the teacher to allow him to attend school. He must procure a uniform to fit him, and he has to walk to school each day, where he must sit near the front of the small classroom because he does not see well. Almost everyone in the movie is skeptical of such an old man’s attempts at education. His aged peers, who congregate to share beer and conversation, scoff at him as he treks to and from school each day.

Those in charge of the school administration are reluctant to allow Maruge to participate in the system, despite the initial newspaper advertisements that vaguely outlined “free public education for all.” The townspeople and parents are not certain about Maruge’s motives or place in the primary school classroom and ultimately begin to believe that both he and the young woman who plays his teacher in the film are being compensated by the press.

His classroom peers, however, accept him unequivocally and learn from him several times in the environment of their impoverished one-room school. When their teacher is forced to relocate to another school because she has allowed Maruge to remain in the classroom, the students revolt and throw objects at the group of administrators escorting their teacher’s replacement. Their beloved teacher is allowed to return. Although not depicted in the movie, Maruge, a model student, was elected by his classmates as “head boy” of his school in 2005, the same year he boarded a plane for the first time and came to the New York City to speak to the United Nations on the importance of free primary education.

The film is not perfect and can be melodramatic at times, but the schoolchildren are wonderfully portrayed by local village youngsters, and the most significant theme pertains to overcoming oppression and subjugation—both political and mental—through educational attainment. It conveys a message of value: as Maruge says at one point, based on an adage passed down to him, “I'll keep learning till I have soil in my ears.” After completing five years of primary education, Maruge died in 2009.