Huruma Tupu! Old Boys Of Alliance Boys High School Speaks Out On The Horrors And Torture After Media Reports Went Viral!

Piece by: Grace Kerongo
Lifestyle

After the expose on Kenya's top national school hit the headlines and went viral, more information related to the bullying in the all-boys school has emerged.

An old boy of the school has come out to corroborate the story saying that the torture story is true and it left many of his peers scared for life, physically and emotionally.

"Believe me, for the vast majority of the students it was a soul crushing hell on Earth encapsulating every small and large cruelty of a backward British boarding school. It was really designed to raise up Kenya's new colonialists. Black ones this time. We had the notion of Milk Boys. What were Milk Boys? They were 2 boys chosen from among the newly arrived first formers to daily procure milk from the kitchen and brew tea or coffee from the school Captain and his henchmen at what we called, with no sense of irony or shame, the White House. Mind you, the rest of the school had no access to milk. It was and apparently continues to be, a total disgrace," he wrote on social media.

"The headmaster at the time was an old boy, as is the tradition there, and senior prefects would beat first formers in the full view of his office, at around sundown. He and other teachers who went through the school were fully aware of the going ons and approved of them. I think legally they probably have a case to answer," adding "The board of governors then, and I expect now, was made up old boys who were or were close to Kenya's who's who and had probably been victimized and indoctrinated in the same brutal fashion."

In a bitter commentary he continued, "I see that the shame of Alliance High School still continues unabated, well more than 2 decades after we left it. Generally, we old boys of the school like to minimize or ignore the fact that in many important respects, the school system there has for decades (and probably for its entire history) been a fantastic laboratory of the hierarchies and cruelties of colonialism. As well as unmitigated adolescent psychopathy carefully natured by a string of headmasters who went through the same rotten system. It really is no wonder that Kenya has turned out the way it has since a great majority of the post-independence cabinet went through that old Great School. For the time being, the ministry of education should insist that all the AHS teachers should have gone through more egalitarian high school experiences. In the long term, we should work to ensure that high schools in Kenya are all public, free of any charge, uniformly high quality and so indistinguishable from each other that they will be known by random numbers. They should be day schools that the neighborhood kids attend and attending one rather than another should confer on a kid no advantage whatever except that of geography - That they are schooling closer to home rather than far away from it.

Other old boys joined the conversation.

Here are their comments about the horror stories from Alliance High School.

"I was not from a privileged background but somehow escaped the scarring because I kept a low profile, though I too did do well academically speaking. There was this class thing going on though, with Wags and his clique of handpicked prefects, the overlords. The 1993 incident occurring during the Mwakaba and Wafula reign. I never questioned it then because I assumed that's the way life is: it being the 1990s the beginning of the end of the corrupt Moi dictatorship," wrote one.

Another also added, "It was and apparently continues to be a horrific experience. I had it relatively easy but lots of my compatriots there had it really had. If they are upright and unbroken men today, it really is no thanks to the school."

This was seconded by another old boy who wrote,

"It actually scarred a lot of kids for life. Mind you, to escape the possible accusation of sour grapes, I wasn't one of them. Being a top student (such as I was) and (believe me) not having come from a dirt poor background immunised me to a lot of the school's rabid cruelties. It was not just about academic class. The harassment and humiliations were felt most keenly by students from poor rural backgrounds, on whom it was open season for their entire tenure there."