Kenya has worked to position itself as a global and regional peace maker, however these efforts stand in contrast to its ability to handle peace internally. Continued political violence has impacted Kenyan governance, yet new school curricula remain largely silent, particularly on the 2007/2008 post-election violence and broader patterns of state repression. Despite total education overhaul, education in Kenya avoids addressing past conflicts instead using vague calls for peace. Drawing on interviews with Kenyan educators, post-conflict education in Kenya will be examined as a vehicle for peace that ignores the question of why peace is needed.
Widely seen as an example of stability in a high-conflict region, the violence that followed Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election shook not only the nation but the world. The announcement of President Mwai Kibaki’s re-election sparked allegations of fraud, leading to widespread protests along ethnic lines and state-sponsored violence. In the violence that followed, over 1,500 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. The violence had lasting impacts on Kenya, most notably a new Constitution in 2010. Largely seen as a resolution to the political violence of 2007/2008, the Constitution set in motion longer-term policy implications.
The Constitution and policy guide, Kenya Vision 2030, called for education reform. Due to the slow nature of Kenyan legislation, complete educational reform in Kenya only gradually became reality. After a series of working papers, reports, and a nation-wide needs-assessment, the new Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) was implemented in 2021. Notably, the reform shifted Kenya’s content-based and assessment-focused structure to a competency-based approach. Kenya is one of the last nations in the East African region to reform their educational curriculum to this new standard of ‘best practices.’
Despite Kenya’s domestic struggles, Kenya has positioned itself as a regional and global peace broker, mediating conflicts in Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and more recently, leading peacekeeping efforts in Haiti. Yet, while advocating for stability abroad, Kenya’s new CBC avoids engaging with its violent past. The reform promises to create “engaged, empowered and ethical citizens,” and to “avert the behavioural and values crisis in the country.” However, policy documents do not specify which crises or why they occur in the first place. Instead, the first goal of Kenya’s national education calls for peace and unity:
Kenyan Education should: Foster nationalism, patriotism, and promote national unity. Kenya’s people belong to different communities, races and religions and should be able to live and interact as one people. It should also promote peace and harmonious co-existence.
Allusions to crisis and the timeline of publication suggest that the 2007 post-election violence played a crucial role in reshaping Kenya’s education policy. However, this is not taken up by curriculum policies, texts, or materials. Instead of acknowledging the political violence or its causes, such as ethnicity, land disputes, or corruption, the curriculum does not engage with political violence nor times of crisis in Kenya’s history. This domestic avoidance is striking given Kenya’s peacekeeping efforts, where it has sought to promote stability in conflict zones like the DRC.
Instead, in the name of fostering peace, the CBC broadly emphasizes cohesion, unity, and patriotism, leaving out any mention of past or current political violence. However, avoiding discussions of political violence does not create neutral citizens. Rather, it leaves young people to absorb the narratives available in their communities, which can be biased or incomplete. By neglecting these difficult topics, Kenyan education fails to provide students with tools needed to understand the structures that sustain conflict.
Silencing Conflict
Teaching contested pasts has been extensively studied in high-conflict and politically extreme cases, such as Germany, Rwanda, and South Africa. In these cases, the selection of memories and versions of the past depicted in textbooks are hotly debated. While these cases present strong examples of how different nations grapple with their contentious histories, Kenya presents a different case. Kenya has experienced low-intensity but persistent political violence, especially during presidential election cycles.
Despite the shock of the 2007 political violence, it neither began nor ended then. Political violence has permeated Kenyan society since colonialism, creating a population that has, as Daniel Branch writes, “become accustomed to endemic social and political violence.” This may explain why, in Kenya, politicians have not been held accountable for past human rights violations, nor for inciting violence. Despite his alleged role in the 2007 post-election violence, current Kenyan president William Ruto saw his ICC case dropped, further reinforcing a culture of impunity. His political rise, shaped by shifting alliances and ethnic power dynamics, reflects broader patterns in Kenya’s governance. Therefore, what is taught in Kenya (and what is left out) becomes interesting in light of continued political violence, the lack of accountability, and control of official narratives.
Yet the exclusion of political violence from educational curricula does not mean young Kenyans are unaware of it. Instead, they encounter it in their daily lives—through protests, media, and their communities. This contributes to growing generational tensions in Kenya, where older political leaders view the youth as a destabilizing force. Indeed, the widening age gap between “geriatric leaders and restless youth” is a major source of political tension across the African continent. Rather than empowering young people for civic engagement, political elites often frame them as needing control and containment.
Approaches to contentious pasts
Falk Pingel of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media, identified three broad approaches to handling contentious histories following a period of national conflict: Separation – Avoiding difficult historical truths, Harmonization – Presenting a national past that smooths over conflict, and Multiperspectivity – Encouraging a critical and nuanced engagement with history.
Separation involves adopting one-sided narratives, often perpetuating conflict by reinforcing competing “truths,” such as in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the 1992–1995 war. Harmonization seeks to impose a singular, unifying national narrative, as attempted in Rwanda. Rwanda promoted a vision of unity, but efforts to produce new textbooks ultimately failed. Multiperspectivity encourages dialogue between conflicting historical perspectives, treating history as an evolving, communicative process. This approach was pursued in South Africa after Apartheid.
What happens when a new curriculum does none of these? Kenya is a case in point: with little mention of Kenya’s post-independence history, educators are left to decide if and how they cover current issues.
Dilemmas in Teaching Political Violence
Teachers often find themselves in a difficult position—faced with the realities of continued political violence but with educational materials that ‘sanitize’ Kenya’s past. This leaves teachers to individually contend with how they approach teaching conflict. Emma, a Kenyan primary teacher and scholar, wrestles with teaching political violence:
“Are we talking more violence? Am I going to put more on the violence or talk about peace? What brings peace and helps people? I would concentrate more on things that bring us together… What is peace? How do we bring peace? And what are the benefits of peace?”
For Emma, teaching should be about fostering inclusion and promoting harmony, without negativity. She questions the necessity of teaching about violence in school at all:
“…why am I to teach about the negative? Why don’t I teach about the positive? I would spend my more energy on such things, because if we did them properly, then there should be no violence.”
Conversely, Roger, a teacher educator and university professor, disagrees. He warns against ignoring the issues of Kenya, citing the on-going violence and corruption in Kenya. At the time of these interviews, the Kenyan Vice President, Rigathi Gachagua, was being impeached on accusations of tribalism and ethnic favoritism. On teaching Kenya’s political violence in education, Roger says:
“Let’s talk about reality. The reality here is Kenyans should teach tribalism and all those things in the curriculum and the leaders themselves practice tribalist way of doing things in the government. Because if you say the Vice President is tribal, what about the president? The president has employed all his people in the government, all his people, so it’s a big problem.”
This highlights a continued issue – political violence has not ended. Even if children are not taught about political violence in the classrooms, they are experiencing it via media or in their lived experiences. Peter, an educational practitioner and expert on indigenous education, says:
“Even now, even today, there is conflict in Tana River. Just today, if you read today’s papers, there’s conflict. There is conflict everywhere in Kenya… But the challenge is that children are learning within this conflict. So sometimes you ask, how are they managing their learning? You know, the people come and shoot the school, even kill the children, even kill the teacher, even kill the chief, you see, but the children are still supposed to learn.”
The challenge of education is not simply to determine what is taught but how narratives are framed. In Kenya, where legacies of violence have impacted society long before the 2007, the decision to exclude these events from the curriculum is not incidental—it is political. By avoiding discussions of political violence, the education curriculum risks (or aims at) producing citizens who are unprepared to critically engage with the structures that perpetuate conflict. Ruth, a primary teacher, faces this fact:
“We have to teach from known to unknown, and what we know is those post-election violence…”
Educators charged with developing Kenya’s new curriculum face an important question: should they continue treating education as a peaceful tool without teaching the violent past? The experiences of Emma, Ruth, Roger, and Peter show that this question is not abstract— children are growing up within ongoing political violence, yet their textbooks and teachers remain silent.
If Kenya is truly committed to peace, both internationally and domestically, then its education system must move beyond avoidance and engage with the political realities shaping young Kenyans’ lives. As its recent AU election loss reveals, Kenya is a nation eager to lead but unwilling to confront its internal fractures. Instead of sanitizing the curriculum, Kenyan education should equip students with both the historical information and critical thinking skills required to analyze the roots of conflict, rather than concealing them.
Meredith Whye
