“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” This sentiment expressed by Nelson Mandela seems to reflect the legacy of a woman who came to Kenya in the first quarter of the 20th Century.
In 1916, Jane Elizabeth Chadwick, an Anglican Irish missionary, was sent in from Buganda by the Church Mission Society. She was to work under her younger brother, Walter Chadwick, who had also been sent to serve in Butere, Kakamega four years prior.
While in Kenya, Jane Chadwick discovered her calling: to start a school for the African girls in the area. Initially, she enlisted the help of two teachers from Buganda. Together they offered reading, writing, singing and sculpture classes. With time, Chadwick and team added sewing, drawing, drills, and catechism classes. Bible lessons were also included in the syllabus. The first students were particularly fond of the sewing classes that measures had to be taken to regulate it in order for the girls to stay focused on the other classes.
Chadwick was all about nurturing the talent around her. Of the first fifty students, two exemplary girls, Mapesa and Lydia Kitandi, distinguished themselves from early on. Their influence and discipline were so impeccable that the school employed them as teaching assistants, balancing their new roles with their studies.
As Butere Girls continued to empower the girls in the area, an unavoidable circumstance soon loomed out of a smallpox outbreak. The malady led to an attendance decline; of the 50 girls initially enrolled at the school, 34 left. The numbers picked up in early 1917 but declined once again at the onset of World War I. East African men were drafted into the Carrier Corpse a British arm of the military where the men largely served as porters. Their presence in the war spelled their absence in tilling the land, a gap that women had to fill.
The women soon acclimatized to the men’s absence, and now, having fewer men to cook for, they developed routines that allowed them to attend school. Therefore, when the war came to a close in 1918 and the surviving soldiers came home with a thirst for learning, the women were ready and willing to supply knowledge. Armed with lanterns, the students became the teachers, and they would sit teaching the men until the wee hours of the night.
In 1937, Butere Girls expanded to host its first cohort of 36 boarding students and in 1957 it became a fully-fledged secondary school with maroon skirts and white blouses. The school has since produced notable Old Girls – a name by which the alma matter are known – such as Lady Justice Effie Owuor, Kenya’s first female High Court judge, and Mary Okelo, Kenya’s first female bank manager. Speaking of the two female firsts, have you read the stories of our Pioneer women in our #KeFemaleFirsts campaign?
Butere Girls High School goes down in the books as a women-empowering institution. We’ve shared the history, now we call upon you to tag the alma mater and share your memories of Butere in the comments.
