The First Grader (2010) by director Justin Chadwick of The Other Boleyn Girl, sells itself as the inspiring story of Kimani N’gan’ga Maruge [Oliver Litondo]an 84 year old man who stubbornly persists in going to a primary school, where he is not wanted, after the Kenyan government promises free education for everyone.  And it is inspiring.  The tall, thin, wispy bearded man, limping along with a staff day in and day out, insisting that he needs to learn to read, even as the locals jeer him and the school superintendent orders him expelled, taking his seat among first graders and painfully achieving his dream: to read and write.

What isn’t in the marketing paraphernalia of the film is the inspiration brought by his flash-backs to the anti-colonial struggle against the British led by his Kikuyu people — and it was no polite British affair.  Since the Anglo-American alliance of  the Second World War the “book” on the British, greatly enhanced by the BBC-PBS alliance, has them as genteel, kind, tea-sipping cousins. Nary a bad bone among them. If this is true now — and reports of British army behavior in Iraq would suggest not– it was certainly not in the days of the British Empire, and certainly not as it ended in blood and rebellion.

We may know something of the liberation of India in 1947 at the end of decades of agitation, made soft by the aura of Mahatma Gandhi.  We know next to nothing about the rising of the Mau-Mau faction of the Kikuyu tribe and the bloody warfare from 1952 to 1960 and the eventual independence of Kenya in December 1963.   Neither do many in contemporary Kenyan society, according to the movie.  The First Grader gives us some sense of these events, and the divisions in Kenyan society that persist to this day.  Even the wonderful teacher, Ms. Jane Obinchu [Naomie Harris], who fights the department of education and her own husband to retain Maruge in the class, heatedly tells him that her own parents were British loyalists in the struggle.

While the sketch of the rising may be a first-grade rendition, favorable to the Mau-May version of a divisive civil war, it leaves no question as to British brutality and torture.  Maruge, even at 84, picking up the militancy of his youth, storms the state board of education, in defense of Ms Jane, who has been exiled to a small school some 300 miles away.  Taking the bureaucrats by surprise, he strips off his shirt to reveal the scars of whippings 50 years before.  He tells them “they cut off my toes!”  His wife and two children had been killed.

The other inspiration in these insipid  ideological days of wars on teachers in America, is that of the loving, smart, fighting teacher — handling a rural classroom of 50 children  and 84 year old Maruge.  Her taking him on as her teaching assistant to side-step his banishment as a student is a fine piece of resistance, and is repaid by his ability to engage and help the children.  The love of learning and endearing behavior of the children are inspiring.   An absolutely wonderful child-led rebellion drives off her replacement after she is sent into exile and sets the stage for her return.

An of course the main inspiration is the old man’s iron-willed determination to read and write, his painful attempts to draw the letters and remember their names — his terror of a pencil sharpener, which is simply the final reason among many you should see this movie, and be inspired multiple times.