In mid-July of this year, students at Tambach Boys High School, a secondary school located in the West Kenyan county of Elgeyo-Marakwet, went on strike. After breaking a series of classroom and dorm windows, students left campus and peacefully marched 12 kilometers, up the thousand-meter escarpment of the Kerio Valley, to the county’s capital town of Iten where they registered protests over what they described as poor academic preparation for their upcoming national exams.

School officials responded by closing the campus and calling on parents to urge students to cease their public complaints. Their admonishments did little to quell discontent. Across western and central Kenya during the second half of July, students rose to express similar complaints. Coming on the heels of the June 25 and Saba Saba protests (both of which were met with deadly government responses), students in both large and small towns—from Kijabe to Iten to Eldoret to Lieten—carried out similar actions, voicing dissatisfaction over a range of issues, from substandard academic preparation to sexual abuse by teachers to poor food.

While many in Kenya dismiss student protests and strikes such as these as the “petty” work of  “mobs” and unserious students, student protest in Kenya is rooted in anticolonial struggle and discontent driven by aspirations of educational attainment and humane treatment.

Student strikes in what is now Kenya have a long history, beginning soon after the expansion of colonial schooling in the region. As early as 1910 and 1912, after roughly a decade of uneven mission school expansion from the Indian Ocean coast to Lake Victoria, students at schools in the West Kenyan towns of Maseno and Mumias used strikes to call for more rigorous academic training in place of the rudimentary instruction promoted by mission educators. In the mid-1920s, in what historian Derek Peterson has referred to as the “school garden crisis,” students and community members in Nyeri uprooted crops planted on mission school grounds and boycotted classes to register frustration over land disputes. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, according to the autobiographies of prominent anticolonial leaders and thinkers such as Tom Mboya, Oginga Odinga, Moody Awori, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, students at St. Mary’s High School in Yala, Mangu High School near Thika, and Alliance High School in Kikuyu carried out strikes and protests demanding better food and more humane disciplinary policies. Even on the eve of independence, in 1962, students at the newly founded St. Patrick’s High School in the small town of Iten refused to eat and boycotted their coursework because, in the words of one participant, they “demanded to be given… better curriculum than what the school was offering.”

Both then and now, such actions reveal something important about the way Kenyans understand school. They are rooted in a deep and searing hope among many Kenyans that schools, despite their flaws, hold the potential to provide an avenue for individual success and social transformation. Despite the oppressive roots of Kenya’s contemporary education system, belief in the promise of schools goes back to the colonial era as well. Though accessible to a tiny minority of Africans, colonial schools were often adopted and adapted as spaces of community-building, social mobility, and anticolonial activity. Following independence, parents and students used schools to challenge Kenyan elites and international education organizations. Local communities built hundreds of “Harambee schools” (often against great odds), with the hope that schools would help them reap the benefits of uhuru (Kiswahili for freedom). A few pursued university degrees in the US, Western Europe, and the Soviet Bloc. Such faith still exists today, as I witnessed recently at Ngesumin Girls Secondary School in Kericho, where on July 11 of this year, hundreds of students, community members, and school officials took part in a day-long sherehe (Kiswahili for celebration)—complete with music, speeches, and gift giving—to recognize the matriculation of 26 graduates to Kenyan universities, the largest number in the school’s history.

Despite such hope, the overwhelming result of schooling in today’s Kenya, as was the case during the colonial era, is the reproduction of social inequalities and the strengthening of class divisions. The foundational structure of Kenyan education, sitting as it does on a series of high-stakes national tests and admission into a hierarchical system of prestigious national boarding schools and less prestigious county and subcounty schools, guarantees that the nation’s top educational institutions are reserved largely for the sons and daughters of elites, leaving the bulk of the nation’s youth struggling with poorly financed facilities and overburdened educators.

Though some may see breaking windows, boycotting classes, and marching through town as ineffective ways of promoting change, these moments of struggle demonstrate both the contested reality of the country’s schooling past and the potential for an alternative path forward. Rooted in the history of Kenyan schools is a profound paradox, pitting a deep respect for the liberatory power of education against intense frustration and anger over the barriers that exist in pursuit of that liberation.

While there certainly are inspiring examples in Kenyan history of the power of schools and education to transform people’s lives, the history of the nation’s student strikes demonstrates that, for over a century, Kenyan students have been deeply aware of the unfair, punitive, rigged, and unresponsive nature of their schools. The spate of student protests in Kenyan schools in mid-July are just the most recent attempt on the part of the nation’s youth to express their belief that something is deeply amiss within Kenyan education. If the nation’s schools are to be transformed to benefit a broader range of wananchi (Kiswahili for citizens), Kenya’s elders and elites would do well to listen.