This dissertation examines the early history of St. Patrick’s High School, an all-boys Catholic secondary boarding school located in the west-Kenyan town of Iten. While an institutional history, this work is primarily concerned with people – the students, teachers, coaches, administrators, and staff who populated St. Patrick’s during the 1960s and 1970s. This study traces the founding, construction, development, and ultimate flourishing of St. Patrick’s from 1961 to 1976, a period which parallels the transition from colony to independent nation in Kenya and during which school members helped make St. Patrick’s one of Kenya’s most well-known educational institutions, especially in sports. I argue that by taking part in a range of activities – in classrooms, student organizations, sports competitions, and others – St. Patrick’s community members made their school into a negotiated place of social meaning as they sought to respond to the challenges, contradictions, and possibilities of the late colonial and early independence eras in Kenya. Through their efforts, they forged an institutional identity defined by notions of discipline, unity, development, achievement, and prestige. At the same time, this process was not seamless. Conflict and struggle were defining characteristics of the period, at times leading to the marginalization of those who did not fit within the school’s official identity. Yet, through their efforts of pray, work, and play, St. Patrick’s became a place where members imagined and negotiated a place for themselves in the world. In addition to engaging with a broad range of literature on Kenyan schools, the central sources are oral histories, student writings, and national newspapers. As a bottom-up history of a school in western Kenya, this study joins scholarship seeking to understand schools as negotiated places of meaning.
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