Clifford Chianga Oluoch is not your ordinary teacher. Not that teachers are ordinary people.
What would society be today without teachers? What would mothers and fathers who wake up in the middle of the night to prepare for work and arrive home almost at midnight do with their children if there were no schools?
Teachers are mere mortals but their work is often immortal. Teachers make women and men out of mere children. Teachers become mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters, caregivers, nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, mentors etc, the moment the child enters the school gate – and the parent turns their back on the child.
Clifford Chianga Oluoch – also known as Odijo (old school Sheng for teacher) – has been teaching all his adult life, since 1987, and writes about his experience with the passion of a man who is fully wedded to this job.
Although the principal of Regis School in Runda, Nairobi, Odijo, doesn’t look the type when you meet him. With a broad smile, this gentleman with basketball player height tends to slip into the background in social places, without any sense of irony that his height would reveal him.
Surprising achievements
Odijo is a man whose achievements are surprising in many ways. This teacher is also a humanitarian who runs the Homeless of Nairobi feeding program with friends and supporters.
At the same time, Odijo was an accomplished teacher of Mathematics and Physics in the 1990s (which he no longer teaches, opting for creative writing). Add to the mix creative writing, with several titles, the most known ones being the Eastlands series, which are based on life in the Eastland neighbourhoods of Nairobi.
To know a little bit about Odijo, one needs to read his autobiography, A Perfect Score: Memoirs of a Teacher (Odijo Foundation, 2021). This life story is really a collection of snapshots of his life, from a nursery schooler to a classroom and sports teacher at Strathmore School to head teacher at Premier Academy (where it ends). The anecdotes collected here illustrate best this man’s life and world. What is life if not collections of little encounters and moments with family, colleagues, friends, strangers and the nonhuman?
Eastlands has become a place of nostalgia for a whole generation of Nairobians/Kenyans. As the designated residences for Africans in the colonial era, Eastlands is where most African workers in the colonial services lived.
Clerks, drivers, nurses, teachers, the skilled, semiskilled and non-skilled Africans who worked in Nairobi called Eastlands their ‘second’ home because many of them had their rural homes. However, later generations would be born in Eastlands with little or no connection to the countryside.
Odijo’s generation does have relatives in their ancestral homes, with some of them even having ‘retired’ to the countryside. But those who remain in Nairobi see Eastlands as not just their birthplace but also some kind of place of formation.
It is the place that made the tough women and men of Nairobi. This is why Odijo and some members of his generation have initiated conversations on ‘Remembering Eastlands.’ This initiative involves storytelling sessions about the neighbourhood, with reminiscences on such topics as old sheng versus current sheng or how Nairobi has transformed and what this means for those living in Eastlands.
The group hopes to publish these conversations for posterity. The first of these conversations happened in June 2022. Odijo says that the old Eastlanders plan to have the second one in June this year.
But to read A Perfect Score: Memoirs of a Teacher is also to read the story of a struggle for self-improvement, which subsequently seems to have informed Odijo’s choice to become a teacher and a humanitarian.
Hard life
Life wasn’t easy for Odijo and his family, especially in the 1980s when the economy tanked and his father’s meagre income could barely support the family.
For instance, he remembers 1984 as ‘a tough year.’ Why, because his father was “almost retiring, but also struggling with, amongst other things, energy-sapping and financially draining ancestral land issues.” Financial distress meant that Odijo didn’t even have essential textbooks for his homework, yet he was a Form 4 student.
However, the economic difficulties at home did not deter his spirit. His English teacher, Ernest Quintal, lent him a copy of the English textbook.
He convinced his father to buy him a copy of the Mathematics textbook. But buying the book meant that “… the following morning’s breakfast would be black sugarless tea with leftover ugali.” Still there was the problem of transport from home to school. Luck would be on his side when the school bus conductor, Kipsiele arap Kolibet, allowed him on the bus in the morning till his father would pay the transport fee.
Nonetheless, trouble tends to come in doubles. Odijo had to stop taking school lunch, too. Again, he was saved by the generosity of two of his classmates, who raised Sh800 and paid for his lunch.
Back in Jericho, his local parish hired Odijo “to do clerical jobs for him during the school holidays and the following weekends of the school term.” This is how many successful men and women today were raised, and Odijo is a living example who isn’t afraid of speaking about his humble beginnings.
It isn’t surprising at all that Odijo learnt from his benefactors in his youth that humanity is much better off if those who have could share some food, clothing and shelter with those who don’t have. Philanthropy doesn’t have to be some big donation from big companies. Odijo writes this in A Perfect Score about how his involvement in humanitarianism has expanded, “In November 2014, I started a daily feeding programme for street families in Westlands.
This would later grow into an initiative to rescue young boys from street life. We placed the boys in our Homeless of Nairobi (HoN) Children’s Home in Gachie where 35 school-going children, all previously living in the street, reside. We also continue with feeding close to 100 street boys daily in Westlands.”
In a world that is increasingly abandoning orphans, the old and the poor, who end up in homes on the streets of urban centres, Kenyans may have to try and learn the finer details of the lives of the people we call chokora and street families like Odijo discovered after interacting with the ‘wretched of the earth.’
Thus, in many senses, once Odijo is done with teaching (and learning) at the formal school, he goes to kwa ground school; the school of hardship, suffering, abandonment, lack, misery etc, where his intervention and that of his friends are everyday lessons on what humanity has lost and what it could regain if people made a little bit of investment in emotional quotient.
Some of the lessons Odijo has learnt on the streets of Westlands and Nairobi make up the anecdotes in A Perfect Score. Probably, one would speculate, these lessons have also influenced his career towards creativity.
Asked why a trained teacher of Mathematics and Physics – subjects that the Kenyan system of education places premium value – would choose instead to teach creative writing, Odijo’s answer is, ‘For me, Math and the sciences are too invested in the intelligence quotient of the learner whereas the Creative subjects are about the Emotional Quotient.”
He argues further that creative subjects seek to provoke the talents in pupils and enhance their creativity. In his opinion, the way the curriculum is taught in most Kenyan schools is not creative enough. Thus, today, Odijo, spends most of his teaching time thinking about how to use creativity and creative writing to make teaching enjoyable and productive for his students.
The writer teaches literature, performing arts and media at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]
