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One day, as usual, two weeks before the district assessment examinations I photocopied them for her and she attempted the papers. When I marked them, she would scoop an A. Three days before the examinations, the government cancelled all the papers countrywide citing irregularities. New examinations would be printed and sent to all the schools within three days. The Minister for Education announced that the dates would not change. My forty days had come unexpectedly. She performed so poorly and was so withdrawn I tried urging her to move on but she quit school.
On that fateful Saturday morning, she woke up as usual, made tea for the family and resigned to her room. In there she took her diary and wrote everything about our illicit relationship and how I had been helping her get good grades in the examinations. Her family was enjoying breakfast when Irene’s younger sister, Mary, was asked to call her. Mary made a powerful painful wail. Irene’s body was dangling on the rope, tied to the ceiling’s lamp holder, lifeless. Her diary lay on the bed.
I was summoned and interdicted two days after her revelation for ‘having an illegal affair with a student under your care and aiding her to cheat in the examinations’, my interdiction letter read in part.
The most painful part about her death, however, was that she was six months pregnant with my child!
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Writer Profile
Mbũrũ
I am a researcher on educational issues especially in the rural areas, with much emphasis on girls' education.
As a trained journalist, I have a lot of concern with the handling of the education sub-sector in Kenya and take a critical role in viewing the reforms currently being conducted to integrate education structures for the sake of the youth in Kenya.
One major aspect, sadly, is that Kenya has been sovereign for over four decades but has been the only African country besides Somalia not to have made education compulsory, free and basic. For Somalia it can be understood - the country had been in civil strife since 1992- but for Kenya the politics of the day have played a negative role in reducing the promotion of education to a system sheer competition, instead of progressive
Apart from that, I write fictitious literature.
Currently I am working on prose on love and betrayal and a collection of poems.
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