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Africa: Higher Education

3 minute read
TIME

According to African legend, one day in a prehistoric matriarchy of Kenya, the men decided that the women had ruled long enough. After wisely making sure that all their rulers were pregnant and in no condition to fight back, the males revolted and reduced their wives to wood choppers and burden bearers, discouraged them from talking or thinking. Now, scores of centuries later, Kenya’s men are sorry. As the country’s independence approaches, its leaders prepare to fill the positions British colonials now hold in the government, the military and the church. But Kenya’s wives—even at the upper levels of government—are woefully unprepared to take their rightful place in the new society. The white women who run Nairobi’s Y.W.C.A. have come to the rescue.

For the past ten months, 15 women—British, Canadian, American, Kenyan—have been running a school at the Y to teach Kenyan women the elaborate manners of diplomacy. Some women who attend are well versed in Western ways, but many arrive with no more social accomplishments than scratching and giggling. The Y.W.C.A. instructors patiently help them through the tangles of Western underwear, show them how to manipulate knives and forks instead of dipping their hands into their food. One instructor climbs into a bathtub and demonstrates how to take a bath. Students find the toilet the most fascinating of all Western gadgets, happily flush it repeatedly.

Once the basics are mastered. Kenyan women matriculate in the Good Hostess school to learn the all-important rituals of cocktail and dinner parties, where so much governmental business is conducted. After paying only $28 for a six-weeks’ course, they learn how to navigate in high heels, how to make artistic canapes, and how to argue with the butcher for a good cut of meat. Some students are fascinated with mixing food and drink, put together duodenum-rending concoctions. One teacher spent half an hour dissuading a determined student from combining sausages and fruit salad as a main course. Students even conquer the art of small talk, are taught to stifle the impulse to ask other wives their age or their husbands’ income.

To date, only 40 Kenyan women have been graduated from the school. But all of these have surprised their husbands by giving a bona fide cocktail and dinner party, with hardly a mishap. Opposition Leader James Gichuru was so pleased with his wife’s progress that he urged his friends to sign up, feels that the tuition is a small price to pay for so profound a domestic change. “There hasn’t been a failure in the lot.” says British School Supervisor Mary Suthrens, 48. “I believe any of our graduates could sit down to a state dinner with the governor or the archbishop without embarrassing anyone.”

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