Bifurcated Peripheralisation: Music, Performing Arts, and Kenyan Education Reform Commissions from Independence to BETA, 1964–2023

Abstract

This article analyses how Kenyan education reform commissions and allied culture-sector instruments have shaped the position of music and the performing arts in the national school curriculum since independence. It applies critical policy discourse analysis to eight commission and task-force reports, together with two culture-stream policy instruments and a subsequent sessional paper, and reads them through a three-register scheme covering epistemic, economic and infrastructural dimensions. The article advances the concept of bifurcated peripheralisation. Music appears repeatedly in two policy streams, education and culture, yet the two streams take up one another's recommendations only partially and intermittently, so that the curriculum-to-career pipeline that would sustain musicianship is built by neither. Within this condition it identifies a sub-mechanism, peripheralisation by absorption, in which music is not abolished but folded into progressively larger composite categories. The evidence indicates that music held compulsory and examinable status at primary level for a single fourteen-year window, and that this standing was lost after 1999, in a period of curriculum decongestion, through an instrument the sources consulted do not identify. A forty-one-year interval separates the 1984 recommendation of a College of Performing and Creative Arts from a comparable 2025 re-announcement, an interval the article reads as diagnostic of a governance architecture without a joined-up pathway for music.