Introduction
In Kenya, as elsewhere in Africa, the elite are a class of highly educated people, more often than not with university degrees and even post‐graduate degrees, who hold well‐paid and influential positions in the civil service, in business, politics and other fields. They are the children and grandchildren of the select few who managed to get western type education and the language of the colonial power—English, French, Spanish and Portuguese—during the colonial era. On attainment of independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s, such people were able to send their children to good schools, even sometimes to schools that had been reserved for Whites only during the colonial era, where the colonial language served as the language of instruction. The children were therefore in a position to obtain appropriate higher education academic credentials that put them on an upward social mobility track.
In this chapter, I trace the construction of elites in Kenya (and by extension in...
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in the 2005 Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education examination, of the more than 60,000 students who attained the minimum university requirement, only about 10,000 will find places in the public universities.
- 2.
Elite parents with even more financial resources send their children to overseas universities such as in Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia.
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Bunyi, G. (2008). Constructing Elites in Kenya: Implications for Classroom Language Practices in Africa. In: Hornberger, N.H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30424-3_68
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