There is an old parable about circus elephants. A baby elephant is tied to a stake with a thin rope. It pulls with everything it has and fails, and each attempt hurts. After a while it stops trying. Years later the same animal weighs around five tonnes and could rip that stake out of the ground without noticing. Yet it stays where it is. The rope never got stronger. The elephant simply learned that trying was pointless.
The parable is gentler than the reality. In parts of Asia, young elephants have been broken through a practice known as phajaan, or the "training crush": the animal is confined in a tight stall, tied so it can barely move, and sometimes beaten until it submits. Welfare organisations such as World Animal Protection have condemned it. The purpose is not to teach the elephant a skill. It is to remove the will to resist.
I keep returning to this image because it describes something many of us carry from the classroom.
A school system built for obedience
Colonial education in Kenya was not designed to produce thinkers. It was designed to produce clerks, interpreters, catechists and labourers who could serve an administration that did not belong to them. Obedience mattered more than inquiry.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o described what this felt like in Decolonising the Mind (1986). At his school, a child caught speaking Gĩkũyũ near the school grounds could be caned, fined, or made to carry a metal plate around the neck with words such as "I AM STUPID" or "I AM A DONKEY". The lesson was not only about language. It was that the knowledge you brought from home was shameful, and the knowledge handed down from the front of the class was the only kind that counted.
Pupils learned to memorise and repeat. Questioning the teacher was insolence. Questioning the syllabus was unthinkable.
The mountain that was never lost
One of the facts we repeated was that Mount Kenya was "discovered" in 1849.
What actually happened is that on 3 December 1849, the German missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf, working for the Church Missionary Society, saw the mountain from near Kitui and became the first European to report it. When he described snow on a peak almost on the equator, armchair geographers in London doubted him, and some, like W. D. Cooley, mocked reports of equatorial snow outright.
But the mountain was not lost, and it did not need finding. The Kikuyu called it Kĩrĩnyaga, and the Embu and Kamba used their own variations of the name. For the Kikuyu it was where God lived, and families built their houses with the doors facing it. Generations had lived in its shadow, farmed its slopes and prayed towards its summit long before Krapf set eyes on it.
The word "discovered" carried a quiet assumption: that something only became real once a European had recorded it. Children across the country wrote that assumption into their exercise books and were marked correct for doing so.
The cage came down. The habit stayed.
Independence in 1963 changed the flag, the anthem and the faces in government. It did not automatically change the classroom. Many teachers had been trained in the colonial system and carried on teaching the way they had been taught: the cane, rote learning and a version of history in which Africans were mostly spectators. Most did so without malice. It was simply the only model they knew.
That is how conditioning outlives the people who designed it. Nobody needs to hold the rope any more. The memory of the pain does the work.
Conditioning is not destiny
It would be easy to conclude that Africans are somehow built to accept limits. History says otherwise. The Maji Maji uprising of 1905 to 1907 in what is now Tanzania, and the Mau Mau struggle in Kenya in the 1950s, were acts of enormous courage against far better armed powers. People who are "wired" to submit do not do that.
What we are dealing with is learned behaviour, and learned behaviour can be unlearned.
I see the rope every day in business. I see it in the founder who assumes a solution must be imported before it can be trusted. I see it in the manager who will not challenge a process because "that is how it has always been done", and in the factory that keeps its records on paper because nobody has asked whether there is a better way. None of these are failures of ability. They are habits formed in rooms where asking questions was punished.
The fix starts small. Ask "why?" in meetings and reward the people who do. Teach children to argue with evidence rather than to recite. Tell our own history in our own names: Kĩrĩnyaga before "Mount Kenya", and the people who lived there before the people who wrote about it.
The elephant is already strong enough. It always was. The only thing left is to test the rope again.