The First Grader is based on the true story of a former Mau Mau fighter and villager, Kimani Maruge, who first went to primary school when he was 84 years old.
Set at a rural school in Kenya, the film tells the story of a tenacious man who responded to a government policy shift to provide free primary education to all Kenyans. Maruge, who spent eight years in detention, was one of the 1.2-million Kikuyu people held in concentration camps during the guerrilla war fought against the British colonialists between 1952 and 1960.
The First Grader stars Naomie Harris as Jane Obinchu (“Teacher Jane”), a tireless rural schoolteacher and principal, Oliver Litondo as Maruge and Tony Kgoroge as Obinchu’s husband.
The story is set in motion when the Kenyan government, in 2003, decides that primary education is going to be free for everyone.
Judging by the difficulties Maruge goes through, the government hasn’t thought through the policy very well. The octogenarian, walking stick in hand, limps to the school — to be met by a surly male teacher who tells him that the offer wasn’t open to everyone, as suggested by the announcement on the radio.
But the kind-hearted Obinchu, testing Maruge’s patience and resolve, tells him that he will only be accepted into the school if he comes in uniform. A few days later, the gangly and, one might add, ludicrous figure of the octogenarian — now in school uniform — makes his way to school to join a bunch of six-year-olds in a packed class. The bureaucrats and parents in the area demand that he be removed and that he go to an adult school.
Maruge’s backstory is his role in the Mau Mau uprising, a war mostly fought by the Kikuyu.
The face of the rebellion is Maruge’s tribesman Dedan Kimathi, who was captured by the British in 1956. (Kimathi was immortalised by writers Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Micere Mugo in the play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi). The Mau Mau war has been all but forgotten by the world, but a few years ago it emerged that American President Barack Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, a veteran of World War II, was also detained.
After coming back from the campaign in Burma during which he fought for the British, the elder Obama joined the Mau Mau movement — an action for which he spent two years in detention.
Justin Chadwick, the British director of the movie, said that he was attracted to the story because it was so different — a narrative that “celebrated life, one man’s story and his determination”.
The Mau Mau narratives are so contested that, depending on you who you ask, the guerrillas were either nationalist revolutionaries or violent tribalists. In Britain, Chadwick said, “there was this one-sided view of the Mau Mau, about how they were murderous”.
In fact, Ngugi’s ambivalent status in Kenya is, in part, because a central motif of his work involves a rather aggressive propagation of the grizzled, triumphant figure of the Mau Mau insurgent who returns from the war, demanding his land and justice. It is, of course, a view that the ruling nationalists want to suppress. After getting independence and most of the land that had been monopolised by the white farmers, the ruling nationalists marginalised those who had taken the oath to fight minority rule.
Even though Maruge’s story is largely inspirational, Chadwick said he “couldn’t shy away from that story [even though] the film doesn’t deal with that struggle. But this history seems to motivate his desire to read. He wanted to read documents and communication related to his case.”
This history, to be sure, is very much in the background of the movie and comes to the fore only in brief, visceral flashbacks. The trauma of the concentration camps — the whips across his back, his ears continually prodded with a sharp pencil, the death of his young wife and son — has never left Maruge. Faced with bureaucratic barricades, he lashes out at tribes that “collaborated” with the colonialists.
The real triumph of the film is how the pupils, Maruge’s fellow actors and most of whom had never seen a camera (or for that matter a television), put in astounding, unscripted performances. With no artifice, no learned mannerisms, they were themselves in original and moving ways.
One poignant episode is particularly instructive. It features Agnes, a shy disabled pupil chatting with an “unwell” Maruge. Agnes earnestly tells him that, when she grows up, she is going to be a doctor so that she can take care of him.
The First Grader is a feel-good movie that is evocative and, at times, moving.
The First Grader goes on circuit on Friday September 23