I waited until the class was over before I spoke to Harrison Mwangi.  I was teaching a third form class, focusing on explicating narrative elements in stories, mentioning in the course of the lesson Chekhov’s observation that a skilled writer could manage a number of narrative threads and bring them to satisfactory resolution just as a skilled archer might shoot a series of arrows in the air, each on different trajectories, but control the shooting with such skill that all the arrows hit the target at the same time.  Harrison had nodded as if in agreement with what I had said.  When I asked him whether he knew Chekhov, he said he did.  “I love the Russians,” he said.  “They remind me so much of Africans.”

     What was I to make of this comment by a baby-faced boy no older than sixteen?  No one in the world, I am certain, had linked Africans and Russians in this way before Harrison had.  And when he told me that he liked to write and had written a novel but had thrown it down a latrine because he didn’t like it, I knew I was in the presence of an unusual intelligence.  

     Here was evidence of Headmaster Alan Flay’s contention that all the Kapsabet boys were intelligent, had IQ’s of at least 116, and could do anything masters wanted them to do.  Flay’s assertion, I came to see, was, in fact, a fabulous fabrication: Intelligence testing for African students didn’t exist.  He knew nothing official about their IQ’s, but the effect of his assertion was that teacher expectations were high.  Over time, Flay’s assertion and the day-to-day functioning of students like Harrison came together for me as a powerful, practical dictum for teaching: High academic achievement is inexorably tied to teacher expectations and to honoring the intelligence of students.