origin story
on beginnings.
Origin stories typically begin with a fixed point that becomes the cannon of lore. Peter Parker’s spider. Bruce Wayne’s alleyway. Harley Quinn’s pit of toxic waste. One random, seismic moment that determines the course of a life.
But for those of us not from Gotham or Stan Lee’s Queens, our lives are a little different. Instead of a single moment that everything stems from, we meander around from experiences to experience, with through lines that are often only apparent through reflection and retrospection.
Oftentimes, our lives don’t begin with us. The hospitals where we are born, the homes where we are raised, the neighbourhoods where we roam — these are all the consequences of choices made by everyone from our politicians to our parents who made these decisions with no conceptualisation our very existence. And nevertheless, this is where our own origin stories begin, deep into the past, and it is up to us to decide where we want our narrative to begin.
I’ll begin mine with my grandparents.
My paternal grandfather, Iddi Simba, was born in 1935. He attended a prestigious, British-colonial boys school in Tanzania, got his Bachelors in Agriculture from the Punjab University in Lahore, and his Masters in Economics at the University of Toulouse. He was a World Bank representative in Washington D.C., then moved to Kampala and London to establish the East African Development Bank. He then became a member of parliament and then Minister of Trade and Industry.
My paternal grandmother, Khadija Ismail Simba, was born in 1944. She went to an Aga Khan school in Tanzania and then took Secretarial Studies at Dar-es-Salaam Technical College. She worked in the office of the first Vice President of Tanzania, then as a commission agent in London, before starting her own factory and business manufacturing and selling sanitary pads.
My maternal grandfather, Nyanga “Bob” Makani, was born in 1936. He attended the same boys school in Tanzania that my other grandfather did, then got his Bachelors in Economics from the famed Makerere University in Uganda, and then got his law degree from the University of Liverpool. He worked at the Central Bank and became Deputy Governor, was President of the Tangyanika Law Society, and founded Tanzania’s first political opposition party.
My maternal grandmother, Vickie Kakuyu Makani was born in 1941. She attended a British-colonial school in Tanzania, then went to nursing school in Dar-es-Salaam. She worked as a nurse in Tanzania and then in London for the National Health Service for over a decade.
My grandparents lives shaped my own in ways that are difficult for me to even adequately understand. Their choices and subsequent accomplishments resulted in social, political, and economic advantages that I then inherited without having to work for. Their experiences and the perspectives that they then expressed to me growing up instilled in me the values that guide me until today. Their legacies stirred in me a sense of pride that came from knowing my story and knowing where I came from, which then gave me the confidence to chart my own path.
And integral to that path would be an education. My grandparents constantly stressed the invaluably salient role education played in their lives, transporting them around the world and transforming the course of their lives. And so growing up, that was what an education was. Both a plane and a lottery ticket, preparing me for the future, whatever that may be.
I was born in 1995. I attended Haven of Peace Academy, an elementary school in Tanzania run by British and American Christian missionaries. I then was a boarding student at Waterford Kamhlaba, a middle and high school in Southern Africa that had been founded in opposition to the Apartheid government. I went to Barnard College, a women’s college in New York City where I got my Bachelors in Political Science, and then I got my Masters in Elementary Education on the West Coast at Stanford. In the fall of 2020, I started teaching transitional kindergarten at a traditional public school in Oakland Unified, and I have been teaching ever since.
Echoes of my grandparents’ stories can be heard in my own. Studying inside and outside of our home country, being educated by Western teachers, before living in the West myself. A love of politics, a passion for service, and a drive to chart my own way forward. My life does not begin exclusively with me and there are aspects of my story that look like extensions and continuations of the stories that my grandparents began themselves. My origin story is one that stretches back.
In reflecting on my life thus far, I can see how right my grandparents were. Through my education, I was able to travel across countries and continents and access opportunities I had never even thought of for myself. And at the same time — having been a student and now a teacher — when I consider my own educational origin story and the stories of those who came before me, what emerges are larger questions around what an education is. Its purported purposes, its sobering realities, and how to make sense of the gulf between the two.
What is an education? To begin with, it is the knowledge, the skills, and the values that are imparted on to students to then form the foundation for their lives.
For many of us, that begins in schools. We envision schools as incubators for students’ future selves, but surely schools have a responsibility to the present realities experiences by children every day. What do our schools look like, what do they feel like, and how does that impact who students grow up to be and who they are right now? An education is the physical spaces of the schoolhouse, the classroom, the playground, the hallway, and everything in between.
Furthermore, an education is the individuals tasked with shaping the lives of students. Dually heralded and derided, teachers are essential to the provision of an education, though there is little to no consensus on how we measure and understand their effectiveness. What is good teaching, how is it done and how is it measured? An education is the classroom teachers, the coaches, the principals, the librarians, the tutors, and everyone else committed to showing up for students.
Lastly, underlying what an education is are the systems of power and privilege that govern it all. The hierarchies of race, gender, class, nationality, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and more that dictate who gets what kind of education and why. The discrepancies that vary from student to student, neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and nation state to nation state, cannot be divorced from our understanding of what an education is. How are the caste systems present in our world maintained through education, and what is possible when imagining how to use education as a counter force against the powers at be? An education is a means of producing equity and perpetuating inequity, through everything from standardised tests, school choice, to childhood friendships.
This is An Education, a mini-memoir in the form of a newsletter that muses on schools, teaching, and equity. By meditating on the educational experiences throughout my life thus far, I plan to wrestle with the question of what an education is, not only out of interest or intrigue, but because I believe that education reveals so much more about our world than we give it credit for. It where all of our origin stories begin, yet it precedes all of us with distance. With every week, I hope to better understand this moment, those before it, and those to come. I hope you will too.