27/11/2024 – Eloïse King’s devastating documentary follows a professor who discovers the mechanisms and psychology behind the Kenyan essayist industry, whose invisible work fuels the West
This article is available in English.
At one point in her shocking and thoughtful documentary The Shadow Scholarswhich premiered at the BFI London Film Festival before screening in the Frontlight section at IDFABritish filmmaker Eloïse King includes images of Tony Blair in 1996, talking at the Labour annual conference in Blackpool. “Ask me my three main priorities for government, and I’ll tell you: education, education and education,” he famously declared. The then Labour leader was referring to schooling as the best tool to “break down the class divides that have no place in a modern country in the 21st century”. Yet education is also often seen as an empowering means of emancipation for people in other countries – countries that Blair and others at the time wouldn’t have called “modern”. In Kenya, for instance, higher education became a priority for many following the country’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1963, with parents and their children hoping that diplomas would help them secure a more fulfilling, higher-earning future. The reality, however, is much darker, and echoes that separation between “modern” and “non-modern” nations in Blair’s speech. Not everyone benefits from education in the same way.
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At the heart of The Shadow Scholars is someone who was not only able to benefit from higher education to fulfil their ambitions, but also become a participant in it. Born in Kenya, Professor Patricia Kingori moved to the UK as a teenager and eventually became the youngest black Oxbridge professor, and the youngest woman to ever be awarded a full professorship at the University of Oxford. A sociologist, she focuses on ethical questions and the experiences of those workers who are typically neglected – frontline workers or, in this case, Kenyan essay writers, hired by students in Western, often prestigious universities, to fully create their work for them and never get any credit. Intrigued by this subterranean industry worth billions of dollars, Kingori travels to Nairobi to meet with a few of these writers, some of whom routinely write five-page essays in 12 hours and work across multiple disciplines, all for very little money.
Refreshingly, King and Kingori oscillate between a straightforward presentation of hard data and historical facts, and more personal, philosophical and psychological questions regarding these workers and the consequences of this industry. The phenomenon of “shadow scholars”, highly educated Kenyans who cannot advance their own careers with their skills, is directly linked to the country’s history as a British colony, as well as to the current breakdown of higher education in the global North. The exorbitant price of college admission in the US (but also in Europe) both accentuates the pressure on students to get good grades at any cost, and prevents Kenyans, however qualified, from ever entering these institutions. In the background, Kingori’s status as a Kenyan-British person, who got to get recognition for her talent yet still often struggles to be accepted as a bona fide scholar due to rampant racism, gives the film an even more heartbreaking and maddening quality. Her ideas and knowledge are, naturally, fundamental to her identity, and she tries to imagine what life must be like when those things are taken away – or when they aren’t originally your own, as is the case for Western students hiring Kenyan writers.
The film’s greatest achievement is in giving a voice to these invisible workers. Kingori meets them in order to get their perspective, and what she finds is surprising. Many refuse to criticise the Western students who hire them, and see their own work in more of a “consulting” capacity; an expert speculates that they have simply found a way to accept the injustice of their situation. It is also a solution to the ethical dilemma of allowing Westerners to become doctors, lawyers or even professors when they don’t really qualify for it. Ironically, the Kenyan “essay mill” is now threatened by AI, which, as Kingori points out, is itself trained on Kenyan brain power – as though no matter what so-called progress may bring, oppression can always find a way to adapt and persist through time.
The Shadow Scholars was produced by White Teeth Films and Lammas Park. International sales are handled by Dogwoof.
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