Opinion | Education | Language & Identity
We Did Not Inherit the English Language. We Earned It — In Blood and Chalk Dust.
Why Requiring Kenyan Students to Sit the TOEFL Is an Insult Dressed as Academic Procedure
There is a particular species of institutional arrogance that does not announce itself with a sneer. It arrives quietly, wrapped in the antiseptic language of “admission requirements” and “standardised assessment”, presenting itself as neutral while quietly reproducing assumptions that no longer withstand scrutiny.
The requirement that Kenyan students sit the Test of English as a Foreign Language — the TOEFL — before gaining admission to universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia belongs squarely in this category. It is one of those practices so normalised by repetition that it has ceased to be interrogated. Yet when examined carefully, it reveals itself not as a necessity, but as an anachronism — one that imposes cost without adding value, and that reflects institutional habit more than defensible reason.
Let us begin with the simplest of facts.
English is not a foreign language in Kenya.
It is one of the two official languages of the Republic, enshrined alongside Kiswahili in the Constitution. It is the language in which Parliament debates, courts adjudicate, policies are drafted, newspapers are printed, and universities teach. We do not encounter English as an optional subject taken a few hours a week. We are educated through it — from the mud-walled classrooms of upcountry primary schools to the lecture theatres of university. English is the medium through which our knowledge is transmitted, examined, and validated. Our entire intellectual formation — from the first composition exercise in a village schoolroom to the doctoral dissertation — is conducted in this language.
We sit the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education in English. We graduate from Kenyan universities having completed years of coursework, examinations, and sustained intellectual engagement in English. Our competence in the language has not merely been assumed — it has been repeatedly tested under formal, high-stakes conditions by institutions whose mandate is precisely that assessment.
To then require us to prove English proficiency through an external examination designed for foreign-language learners is not a reinforcement of standards. It is a duplication without justification.
The Irony of History
History is not incidental to this discussion. It is central.
Kenya was colonised by Great Britain. Not France. Not Germany. The British arrived in what would become Kenya in the 1880s, carved it into a protectorate by 1895, and made it a Crown Colony by 1920. The English language did not arrive through cultural exchange or voluntary adoption. It arrived through empire. British colonial administration embedded English into governance, law, and education. The missionaries who built the first schools at Kapsabet, Maseno, and Alliance did not teach in Nandi, Luo, or Kikuyu. They taught in English — and in doing so, embedded the language so deeply into the intellectual and institutional fabric of Kenyan society that, sixty years after independence, it remains the primary operating system of Kenyan education, administration, and professional life.
English did not become structural by invitation. It became structural by force.
Generations later, English is not a borrowed instrument used occasionally. It is the medium through which Kenyans are formed, examined, credentialled, and employed. That is the irony that no bureaucratic language can obscure: we — a people historically compelled to adopt English — are now required to pay external institutions to certify competence in the very language we were forced to make our own.
This is not merely inefficient. It is conceptually incoherent.
A Test Misapplied
The TOEFL, administered by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey, was developed in 1964. Its explicit purpose was — and remains — to assess individuals from contexts where English is neither an official language nor the primary medium of instruction. In such contexts, the test serves a legitimate purpose. Students from East Asia, the Arab world, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and francophone nations — where English is genuinely foreign, studied as a subject rather than lived as a medium — present a genuine case for external assessment.
Kenya does not belong in that category.
By the time we complete secondary school, we have spent over a decade reading academic texts, writing structured arguments, analysing literature, and engaging with complex material in English. I did this at Chemenei Basic School. I continued at Kapsabet Boys High School. I deepened it at Egerton University. The KCSE English examination is rigorous, testing comprehension, grammar, written composition, and critical analysis at a level that many Western secondary school-leavers would find formidable. And yet Kenyan applicants are processed under the same assumptions applied to contexts where English exposure is limited or recent. This is not academic prudence. It is a failure of categorisation.
There is an additional inconsistency that compounds the absurdity, and it applies with particular force to the TOEFL as distinct from other proficiency instruments. The TOEFL reflects American English conventions and evaluates listening comprehension using American accents. Kenya’s educational system, by contrast, was built entirely within a British linguistic framework. Our textbooks came from London. Our examination boards were Cambridge and Oxford. We were taught to write “colour,” “honour,” and “organise.” We were drilled in the cadences of the King James Bible and the prose of Dickens and Achebe. We write “colour” correctly — by every standard we were ever taught — and may be penalised on a TOEFL writing section that marks it wrong. The British colonised us and taught us to spell in their fashion. The Americans designed the test and decided the British fashion is wrong. We are caught between the empire that formed us and the superpower that now judges us, paying Ksh. 29,950 for the privilege of being marked down for fidelity to the very tradition that was imposed upon us.
It is worth noting here that the IELTS — administered jointly by the British Council, IDP, and Cambridge Assessment English — does not carry this specific indictment. IELTS operates within a British English framework, accepts British spelling conventions, and has historically offered a paper-based format familiar to Kenyan-trained students. The argument against English proficiency testing for Kenyans applies to both instruments on principle — the duplication of certified competence is unjustified regardless of who charges the fee. But the TOEFL carries the additional charge of testing us in a foreign dialect of the very language we were educated in. The irony of the IELTS cuts differently: it is the coloniser’s own cultural arm, the British Council, that now sells certification of the language the coloniser left behind. Different instrument; equally indefensible application.
The TOEFL does not ultimately evaluate whether a Kenyan student can function in an English-language academic environment. It evaluates whether she can adapt to a specific American testing format layered on top of a language she has already mastered. That is not a test of language competence. It is a test of conformity.
On Language, Not Accent
Much of the implicit justification for such testing rests on a quiet conflation of accent with competence. This is a fundamental error.
Accent is the audible imprint of geography. Syntax, grammar, and structure are the architecture of language. A building may be faced in granite or in sandstone; it stands or falls by the integrity of its load-bearing walls, not by the colour of its cladding. And when a Nandi speaker constructs an English sentence — however deeply that sentence may be tinged by the tonal cadences of a mother tongue that has no written tradition but an exquisitely rigid grammatical structure — that sentence is built to British Standard English specifications. The subject precedes the verb. The object follows. The tenses agree. The clauses subordinate themselves in the correct order. The syntax is impeccable, because the Nandi language from which this speaker’s mind was formed is itself a language of fierce grammatical precision. What the Nandi speaker brings to English is not carelessness. It is the disciplined grammar of a mind trained from infancy to take linguistic structure seriously.
The same is true — emphatically, demonstrably true — of the Kikuyu speaker, the Luo speaker, the Meru speaker, the Kisii speaker. The Bantu languages of Central Kenya govern noun classes, agreement morphology, and tonal disambiguation with a rigour that would humble many European grammarians. The Nilotic languages of Western Kenya impose phonological and syntactic rules that demand precision of ear and tongue. When these speakers adopt English, they do not abandon grammar. They transfer their grammatical instincts intact into the new medium. The result is English that may carry an accent — and may carry it proudly, as a man carries the dialect of his hills — but English that is syntactically sound, semantically precise, and academically serviceable.
Here is the question that no proponent of the TOEFL can answer satisfactorily: does a student from Yorkshire speak the same English as a student from Mayfair? Does the Geordie from Newcastle deploy the same vowels as the Oxonian from Balliol College? Does the native of Aberdeen sound remotely like the native of Cornwall? He does not. The accents of the British Isles are so varied, so strikingly varied, so occasionally mutually incomprehensible, that an entire academic discipline exists to document them. No student from Leeds has ever been asked to prove that her Yorkshire English constitutes genuine English. The accent is understood to be a regional characteristic, not an academic deficiency.
In the United States — the very country that designed and administers the TOEFL — the linguistic variation is equally spectacular. Boston English is not Louisiana English. The drawl of Georgia is not the clipped diction of the Upper Midwest. A speaker from Appalachia constructs sentences and deploys idioms in ways that would baffle a speaker from coastal California. Yet no American student has ever been asked, upon applying to an American university, to prove that their regional English meets an international standard. The test is administered by Americans, for non-Americans, in American English — and the profound irony is that it measures the applicant’s proximity to a single dialect while the administrators of that test cannot themselves agree on what Standard English sounds like within the borders of their own country.
And then there is the matter of the Antipodes — a matter so rich in irony that it demands its own reckoning. Australia and New Zealand are among the most aggressive enforcers of English proficiency requirements for Kenyan applicants. A student wishing to study at the University of Melbourne, the University of Auckland, or the Australian National University must produce a standardised English proficiency score before their application is considered. This requirement is presented as a condition for academic participation in an English-speaking environment.
Let us examine that English-speaking environment honestly.
Australian English is not Standard British English. It is a distinct Southern Hemisphere dialect, shaped by colonial transportation, the phonological inheritance of Cockney and Irish English, and over two centuries of geographic isolation from the linguistic mainstream. Its vowel shifts are dramatic and well-documented. Its intonation patterns — including the notorious Australian High Rising Terminal, in which declarative statements are delivered with the rising cadence of questions — represent a substantial departure from received pronunciation. The broad Australian accent compresses vowels, swallows consonants, and produces phonetic combinations that a speaker trained in British Received Pronunciation must actively work to decode. Waltzing Matilda is not the Queen’s English.
New Zealand English compounds this further. The New Zealand vowel shift — in which the short “i” in words like “fish” migrates toward the “u” in “fush”, and the short “e” in “bed” rises toward the “i” in “bid” — is one of the most dramatic vowel changes documented in any living variety of English. Linguists have documented it extensively. It is not subtle. A speaker trained in British Standard English, or in Kenyan East African Standard English, will find New Zealand vowels genuinely disorienting at conversational speed.
Here is the point that no administrator of the TOEFL or IELTS can answer with a straight face: a Kenyan student arriving at the University of Auckland, having passed an IELTS test administered in the British tradition with British accents, will find the English spoken in New Zealand lecture halls and corridors considerably less familiar than the English she was tested on. The test does not prepare her for the linguistic environment she is entering. It merely extracts a fee from her on the way in. Conversely, a New Zealand student applying to the University of Nairobi faces no English proficiency requirement whatsoever — despite the fact that broad New Zealand English, at full speed, in casual register, is considerably less intelligible to a Kenyan ear than Kenyan English is to a New Zealand one.
The asymmetry is not academic. It is colonial. It assumes, without evidence and without examination, that English flows legitimately in one direction only — outward from the Anglosphere, inward toward its former periphery. A Kenyan listening to broad Australian English for the first time is not experiencing a failure of English comprehension. They are experiencing a dialect gap — precisely the same dialect gap that an Australian would experience hearing East African Standard English for the first time. The difference is that only one of them is required to sit a test about it.
Neither the TOEFL nor the IELTS claims to test accent. Both acknowledge, in their published frameworks, that accent is a matter of regional variety and does not impair communication. If that is so — and the testing bodies themselves say it is — then what, precisely, is being measured that twelve years of English-medium Kenyan education has not already measured? The honest answer is: nothing. The requirement, stripped of its bureaucratic justification, is not a measure of competence. It is a reflex — an institutional habit of treating Africa as a place where English is foreign, maintained long past the point at which the evidence could sustain it.
The Economic Barrier
The implications are not merely conceptual. They are material, and they are specific.
The examination fee alone is Ksh. 29,950 — the official ETS rate for Kenya, payable to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey — an institution that operates from America, employs no Kenyan staff, and contributes nothing to the Kenyan economy. That is the headline figure. But it is only the beginning.
No serious student walks into a TOEFL test centre unprepared, because the TOEFL is not merely a test of English. It is a test of familiarity with a specific American-style examination format — four sections, timed separately, administered entirely on computer, with a speaking component that requires structured responses into a microphone within seconds of hearing a prompt. We, whose entire examination lives were conducted with pen and paper in the British tradition, are not automatically equipped for this format — regardless of how fluent our English. And so an industry of TOEFL preparation has flourished — not because we need to learn English, but because we need to learn the format. Formal preparation courses range from Ksh. 19,000 at the entry level to upwards of Ksh. 70,000 for comprehensive programmes. Study materials — the official ETS guide, practice tests, online simulation platforms — add a further Ksh. 3,000 to Ksh. 8,000. Serious candidates dedicate one to three months to this exercise: not acquiring new knowledge, not developing new competencies, but rehearsing a language we have already mastered.
Then there is geography. Kenya has approximately a dozen authorised TOEFL locations, distributed across seven towns — Nairobi, Mombasa, Eldoret, Nakuru, Nyeri, Kisumu, and Meru. In a republic of 55 million people spread across 47 counties, that is not access. It is a bottleneck. Kakamega has none. Garissa has none. Kitale, Bungoma, Kisii, the entire North, the vast interior beyond these seven islands of provision — none. A student from Lodwar or Marsabit or Mandera must plan a journey of days, not hours, to reach the nearest centre, sit a two-hour examination, and return. And should they miss it for any reason — a delayed bus, a family emergency, a registration deadline miscalculated by a single day — they forfeit the full fee and begin again.
| Item | Description | KES (Range) |
|---|---|---|
| Examination fee | ETS TOEFL iBT registration — official Kenya rate via authorised agent | 29,950 |
| Test preparation course | Formal prep classes, Nairobi (4–8 weeks, in-person or online) | 19,000 – 70,000 |
| Study materials | Official ETS prep guide, practice tests, online simulation platforms | 3,000 – 8,000 |
| Preparation time | 1–3 months rehearsing a language already mastered in an unfamiliar format | Unquantifiable |
| Travel to test centre (return) | Bus / matatu to nearest authorised centre — for students outside the seven towns served | 1,600 – 6,000 |
| Accommodation | Minimum one overnight stay near test centre | 2,000 – 4,500 |
| Local transport | Matatu / ride-hail to and from test centre on the day | 500 – 1,000 |
| Additional score reports | Ksh. 5,000 per institution beyond the 4 included — standard for multi-university applicants | 5,000 – 20,000 |
| CONSERVATIVE TOTAL — single sitting, self-study, one extra score report | Ksh. 41,050 | |
| REALISTIC TOTAL — formal prep, upcountry travel, multi-institution application | Ksh. 80,000 – 130,000+ | |
Kenya’s median household income is approximately Ksh. 50,000 per month. What this requirement asks, in practice, is that we and our families spend between one and three months of that income to certify what the Kenya National Examinations Council, Cambridge International, and accredited Kenyan universities have already certified. The Educational Testing Service collects its fee and returns to Princeton. No Kenyan institution benefits. None of us is better prepared for our programme of study by virtue of having passed it.
In effect, the requirement operates as a gate. Not a gate that filters for ability, but one that filters for financial capacity and procedural compliance. What it reliably excludes is not linguistic incompetence. It is poverty.
What Should Be Done
The solution is neither radical nor complex. It requires only that policy be aligned with fact.
Universities should adopt country-sensitive English proficiency policies grounded in educational reality. For Kenyan applicants, proof of English proficiency should rest on a Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education with a minimum grade in English; recognised English-medium examination results such as Cambridge International A-Level or IGCSE; or a transcript from an accredited Kenyan university demonstrating completion of coursework conducted entirely in English. These are not proxies. They are direct evidence.
The Kenya National Examinations Council, the Kenya Universities and Colleges Central Placement Service, and the Ministry of Education should formally advocate — with the force of diplomatic representation if necessary — for the exemption of Kenyan graduates from English proficiency testing requirements at foreign universities. This is not an unusual request. Australia, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand already exempt citizens of certain English-speaking nations from these requirements. Kenya’s case for inclusion is, if anything, stronger than that of some nations already on those lists — and that Australia and New Zealand, speaking the dialects they do, are the ones making this demand, renders the exemption not merely reasonable but long overdue.
The African Union and the East African Community have both articulated frameworks for the recognition of African educational qualifications. The question of English proficiency testing is a natural and urgent extension of those conversations. Kenyan institutions should advocate for this recognition not as supplicants seeking concession, but as equals asserting a self-evident right.
Conclusion: We Were Not Tourists in English
I did not arrive at the English language as a visitor. I grew up in the hills of Nandi County, the son of a man who died three weeks before I sat my primary school examinations. I attended Kapsabet Boys High School — one of the finest English-medium secondary schools in East Africa — where I was trained by teachers who would have accepted nothing less than grammatically precise, intellectually rigorous, beautifully constructed English. I went on to earn a doctorate, and then a habilitation, in Germany — conducting research, writing papers, and defending positions in a language that was not even English. And throughout all of that, English remained my primary language of formal thought and scholarly expression, as natural and as earned as the breath in my lungs.
We were educated in English. Examined in it. Disciplined in it. We built our academic and professional lives through it. We did not inherit it passively — we engaged with it, worked through it, and made it functional within our institutions and our intellectual traditions. To require Kenyan students to sit the TOEFL — at Ksh. 29,950 a sitting, in four test centres, administered by a test designed in New Jersey for students from Chengdu and Riyadh — reflects a system that has not updated its assumptions.
We did not choose the English language. It was imposed on us — with all the weight of empire. But we took it, mastered it, built with it, and made it ours. The least the world can do is take our word for it.
We were not tourists in English.
We were trained in it.
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