Stanford Humanities Center
As I reflected on what to share for this gathering, I kept returning to the moment I decided to write a history of Kenyan competitive running for my dissertation project. It was the spring of 2020 and California was on lock-down. Amidst news of travel restrictions, rising death toll, and constantly checking in with my family back in Kenya, I sat to complete my pending assignments from the Winter Quarter.
I was taking a course titled “Women in African History” and Prof. Joel Cabrita had given us an option to write either a biography of an African woman or for those who identified as African women, to write our autobiographies if we so desired. Throughout the quarter I was vehemently opposed to writing about myself. I had written a number of personal statements for college applications and those were more than enough.
But when I found myself alone in my apartment, taking classes on zoom, and in dire need of some hope, the autobiography became an answered prayer. I wrote it to feel connected to my community which at the moment felt more distant than ever. At a time of despair and uncertainty, I turned to my life history to comfort and ground my spirit in gratitude for all the blessings in my life. The autobiography became both an intellectual and reflective exercise which highlighted for me individual and communal dreams that had helped get me to where I was.
In doing this assignment, I noticed something that had previously been unremarkable to me: the fact that Kenyan competitive runners played a significant role in my educational journey. For my Primary school education, I attended Kipkeino Primary School—a school founded by one of Kenya's first running legends Kipchoge Keino, with financial support from the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Upon completing high school, I decided to apply to universities in the USA as the best chance for me to pursue a degree in the Humanities. I had been admitted to medical school in Kenya and no matter how hard I tried, I could not see myself as a doctor. A program called KenSAP (then, the Kenya Scholar Athlete Project; and now the Kenya Scholar Access Program) provided financial and advising support which helped me apply successfully to Amherst College. This program was founded by another former Kenyan Olympian and American collegiate runner, Mike Boit, and his friend and American journalist, John Manners.
After submitting that assignment, I remained interested in these runners and their experiences. They were by no means part of the political elite or necessarily wealthy, but using the social and financial capital they earned through their running talent, they built worlds that have benefited thousands of individuals and communities, including me. As a historian of Kenya interested in questions of nation, identity, and belonging, I wondered what it would mean to refract the history of the nation through the experiences of these runners. Hence, out of a deep desire for a glimmer of hope during a bleak time, my dissertation project was born. And this is the project I have been working on over the past three or so years.
As part of my research I have read memoirs of and by Kenyan runners, listened to their stories over cups of sweet milky Kenyan tea, and gleaned their stories from different archives and media sources. The lived experiences of these ordinary Kenyan men and women have continued to be a source of hope and inspiration. A common thread in my research shows how Kenyan runners have constantly challenged state narratives that tried to reduce the meaning of their running talent and success towards narrow nationalistic goals. Instead, they have used their running success to improve their socio-economic lives and those of their communities, to create meaningful transnational networks between Kenya and other countries, and for sheer pleasure and enjoyment.
Looking at the state of our world where narratives of grandeur and progress are increasingly premised on military prowess, exclusionary nationalist politics and policies, and technological advancement at the expense of our environment, I have found myself thinking about how the history of Kenyan running can offer alternative ways to imagine and narrate ambition, greatness, and success in more humane ways. I have come to see running as a thing that invites us in an embodied and affective way into a harmonious relationship with our individual selves, the local, national, and international communities of which we are part, and the environment we inhabit.
Indeed Kenyan runners themselves think of what they do as more than just competitive sports. They often see themselves as world makers beyond the stadiums, running tracks, and roads. Over the years they have given Kenyan running a distinctive character: one where success on the track is legitimized by doing good in one’s community, whether through building schools, promoting peace initiatives in conflict-prone areas, or using one’s winnings to support less well-off family members. This is where I see hope in my work: in how these runners show what it can mean to stay connected and committed to one’s local community while still participating in and inspiring a larger global community. It is not a perfect project, and its actors are not romantic heroes. But it is hopeful for a better world.
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Hope: The Future of an Idea
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This year at the Stanford Humanities Center, we asked our fellows to reflect on questions of this kind. Their work ranges from the esoteric to the immediate, from the deep past to the present moment, and across the disciplines from music and art history to philosophy and education. Our aim here is to create a repository of informal thinking about the presence of hope in what we do, not only as scholars, artists, and practitioners but as people living in the twenty-first century.
It is natural to say we live in a hopeless time, as climate change, war, authoritarianism, and other dangers loom over us. Without dismissing the force of despair, this Colloquy proposes to recover the grain of hope, not as a two-dimensional response to three-dimensional problems but as a complex problem on its own. The title of the Colloquy, in which we call hope an idea, is meant to signal this approach.
The contributions collected here, while conceived from many distinctive intellectual and personal positions, are best discovered in twos and threes. Read or watch one, then another and another, at random. Imagine these items as belonging to a virtual conversation, which stands in for the exchange of ideas that takes place every day at the Center. Some of the contributors are professionally connected to the problem of hope—for instance, the historian of philosophy Pavlos Kontos is now writing authoritatively about hope in Aristotle’s thought—while others accept our invitation to fold the topic into their projects or their lives as scholars. Some simply register the place of hope in their lives.
Finally, we bear in mind that, even when it is concerned with historically remote cultures or recondite questions, research in the humanities is always about the present and the future. It is through the lens of the present that we address every question, which means that, except for the most circumscribed topics, we seldom produce definitive answers; instead we tend to offer arguments and interpretations that work for our moment, to be improved by the knowledge and perspectives of our successors. Anticipating that conversation with the scholars of the future, we send off the fruits of our research hopefully to posterity. This Colloquy aims to render hope where the present meets the future.
