Graduation Prep: Siasa za Pesa?

Since the school year runs from January to November, we are gearing up for graduation. Although only the KG2 (the oldest kindergarten class) and the Grade 8s are actually “graduating”, the whole school participates in a graduation ceremony held on a Saturday in November. In our case, graduation will be November 12th and I’ll be sure to update you on how it goes.

The subject of this blog, however, is the prep leading up to graduation. Each class prepares some songs or poems to present to the audience of parents who will attend graduation. Our class is singing three songs: one that I taught them (more on that in a later post), one Swahili song, and one German song. We have two German girls volunteering at the kindergarten a few days per week so that’s the reason for the German song.

We began teaching them the words to these songs about 8 weeks ago. Since they cannot read, teaching them the songs takes a while. Add in non-native or second languages and it takes a while (some combination of English, Swahili, and German are all second and third languages for most kids; sometimes all 3 if the parents speak a tribal language at home).

A few weeks ago, the Baby Class (that’s what they call the youngest kindergarten class) teacher introduced the Swahili song. It’s fairly simple so I recognized a bunch of the words. The verses are about different jobs people can have and encourages them to do them well. For example, these are some verses:

Kama wewe ni mwalimu, fundisha watoto wakenya vizuri
(If you’re a teacher, teacher the children of Kenya well)

Kama wewe ni daktari, tibu wanaichi wakenya vizuri
(If you’re a doctor, treat the people of Kenya well)

Kama wewe ni askari, linda wanaichi wakenya vizuri
(If you’re a policeman, guard the people of Kenya well)

Kama wewe ni mgenzi, jenga schuleza watoto vizuri
(If you’re a builder, build the children’s schools well)

I was fairly excited that I was understanding a lot of the song but the chorus had me stumped:

Wanaichi wote nchini Kenya, siasa za pesa sisi hatutaki

The accompanying motions included the shaking of hands and heads in the universal symbol of “I don’t like that”. Based on my vocabulary at the time, I understood the chorus to mean: “People of Kenya, [something] of money, we don’t want it.” I asked Mary what “siasa” was since that was the word that was tripping me up.

She smiled and said, “siasa is politics so ‘siasa za pesa’ means ‘money politics’”. Really? So the actual translation of that line is “People of Kenya, we don’t want money politics”. So, this is a graduation song for 3 and 4 year olds. Interesting. I asked her if the kids knew what money politics was and she shrugged and said “No”.

Mary and I spend a lot of time together so I knew I could ask her honestly later if this was a ‘normal’ topic for kids to sing about during graduation. She said it wasn’t but that it wasn’t really her choice. She didn’t know why the Baby Class teacher had selected it but that the part about all the different jobs was cute so they were going to go with it.

Below is a video of one of our practice sessions. They’re still learning it so it’s why they’re so distracted but you get the point.



Not that all politics are honest in the US, far from it, but I think it’s pretty telling that we’re singing about money politics and corruption which are huge problems in Kenya. A recent newspaper article divulged that members of Parliament make 33 million Kenyan shillings per year [that’s $412,000 USD]; these salaries in total are more than the entire national health budget. The average Kenyan seems to hate this but they’re also not very hopeful that anyone else would do a better job (any of this sounding familiar on election day in the US...). It’s all part of living in a country that values taking care of family and tribe over country. No one likes it but it is reality. So the kids will voice what the grown-ups are thinking…from the mouths of babes, I guess!