The First Grader- A review by Raymond Machira

It really is the time to be watching Kenyan film, and some friends and I got into the mood starting with First Grader (12 years a slave, the Holy Grail of Kenyan cinema is next). There was another reason to start with this film­ a friend had recommended it. It nearly put us into depression.

The first grader is a film about Kimani Maruge, an octogenarian who audaciously enrolls in primary school (elementary school) at that age. Kimani, at least in the film, is driven with a burning ambition to read, ostensibly to read a letter written to all Mau Mau fighters at independence by the President. The film is interlaced with his harrowing experiences in the war, and just in case you miss it, first peppered then doused with phrases such as “the British stole our land”, “they tortured me” and so on. I don’t know much about the real Kimani, indeed, that he had been a freedom fighter was a revelation to me. My gripe is with the cinematic and casting choices of the producers and its billing.

The First Grader bills itself as an exploration of Kimani’s journey, a quest for education and

Britain’s colonial legacy, yet its far, far from that. For a purportedly Kenyan story, about a Kenyan, set in Kenya, the story is terribly thin on the Kenyan experience. The illiterate Maruge speaks fluent English. The real center of the film is Maruge’s teacher, Jane Obinchu, and is played by Naomi Harris (a Briton).

 Even from the poster, it’s pretty clear whom the focus is on.

I suppose they couldn’t find a Kenyan actor to play the brave woman who made Kimani’s story possible. Indeed, big time Kenyan actors are edged to hanger-on roles in this production. The beautiful Rosemary Waweru (remember her from Tabasamu?) has her 15 seconds as a secretary chasing Kimani and shouting “Excuse me Sir.” Shish, from Tahidi High, fares worse, she’s a stay home “mama wa ploti” who tries for all of five seconds to stop Naomi from stomping to some place I forgot. I was going to make a joke about another African getting overrun by a Brit but I think this is not the place. Gideon “Churchill” Ndambuki at least shows up in a couple of scenes, as a tout, and also doubles as a radio host. The next four major actors, after Harris and Litondo, are all South African.

Yet the bullshit deception flows deeper than the superficial­ the very heart of the First Grader is a web of lies. Perhaps a story shall illustrate. Last year, I organized the screening of Nairobi Half Life here on campus. The film is rough and gritty, and downright hard to watch in some parts.

After the film, the very first question I received from the audience was “Is this really Nairobi?!” About half the crowd stayed for an hour thereafter, and we continuously rewound it, going over scenes and filling in background information. I can bet my wedding finger nothing like that will happen with First Grader. Nothing in it, and I mean nothing is surprising or worthy of explanation to anyone. For a foreign film, that’s an achievement. The focus on colonialism just jars reality. No one goes around Nairobi demanding special treatment or showing scars, yet the colonial legacy was flogged about every fifth minute. And sixth. And seventh. The filming locations, were the wide romanticized expanses of   the real Africa.

The director himself admits how un-Kenyan the film is, saying “We could have shot it in South Africa, but Kenya has this unbelievable, inexplicable energy ­ inherent in the children, and the people we were making the film about". That’s right, they considered cutting out the whole Kenya angle, but Kenyan children were much more energetic than South African ones. A story really about British Colonialism, or even about Kenya, wouldn’t have been wrapped around a feel good story of a patriotic man who wanted to read. It wouldn’t have glossed over the tragic post-independence fate of the Mau Mau, nor spent so much time around crap Kenyans wouldn’t relate too. I mean “First Grader”.

Even if all these were plugged as background info, and the filmmakers had little space to deal with it all at length, the film still comes short. If you measure it, if you take away the pleas related to his desire to read, we hear and learn surprisingly little about the eponymous character. What was his life like, between his Mau Mau days and his first day of school? How did his immediate family take his decision to go back to school? What was his family? (The only snippet we get into this is some market women who imply he has 3 wives).

When asked if Nairobi Half Life was authentic, my answer was an emphatic yes. Sure, its overly exaggerated. The grit was a tad over the top (think the police station bathroom) and the lawlessness too gratuitous (even in Nairobi, getting robbed five minutes out of a Matatu, and getting arrested by Kanju three minutes after is too much). But that really was Nairobi, in blood and flesh. I recognized the streets, the language was the authentic sheng’ I know and love, and the only accommodations paid for those who didn’t was in accurate subtitles. And the actors were people I stand a fair chance of bumping into on the streets. From the onset though, First Grader is a story is for a Western audience. Its dumbed down where it needs to be dumbed down, vilifying where present realities say it needs to be and out rightly bending truth so as to fit to certain preconceived notions and sensibilities. Watching it was a bit like walking around Nairobi with a friend who insists on calling matatus “buses”, and, you can swear, is the sort of chap to write “mom”. And that is the fallacy of this film. It purports to be about Maruge, but isn’t. About free education in Kenya, but the children hardly speak, about British colonial legacy but not really, about Kenya no effort to relate to … Its endless.

I have no gripe with Justin Chadwick, or anyone else involved in the project. They are merely people responding to the fact that the real money in filmmaking comes from audiences, and at the box-office, African audiences are “mlio wa chura” (of little consequence). The real money is elsewhere. And if that means bending a story backwards, so be it. The real culprit here, is more complex than a single man or a team. The fact that we don’t spend much on cinema, hence our film industry is still nascent, the fact that in the little we spend, we spend conscious of this fact. Nice Githinji vs Halle Berry, anyone? I thought so. All these are stories for another day...

I can imagine some portly woman, in the South of England dabbing her eyes with a kerchief during the token torture scenes, yet being entirely unable to relate the consequences of those events with her own fortune. But her momentary sadness is elevated as good finally triumphs over evil, Kimani reads his letter and learns it promises compensation, the good headmistress is reinstated, and the world is once more as good as it was when she walked into the cinema. I knew little about Kimani. But I can’t help feeling he would be severely disappointed.

This is an article by Raymond Machira

raymond.machira@gmail.com 

 Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article do not represent the views of the author of this blog. This work has been in no means altered except for the amendment of grammaticals and formatting of the appearance and replacing the word "titular" with "eponymous".