Academic Life in Kenya is Unrewarding

Here is the thing. If you choose to be an academic in my country, you will, by that very fact, have equally accepted to be overworked, undervalued (if valued at at all), underpaid, frustrated and most likely miserable. In Kenya, just like many other countries in Africa, with an exception of a few, like South Africa, academic labor often goes unrecognized and is hardly ever rewarded. Our governments do not invest in thinking and they do not pay people to think; they do not invest in research and do not consume the outputs of research. A typical university in my home city of Nairobi is a space for exhausted adjunct lecturers who are overworked (teaching tens of modules each semester back to back in multiple campuses round the year with no known holidays or breaks, no benefits, ridiculously little pay which is often paid too late or never in some cases). That is the reason you will be frustrated and if you do not rear some chicken in the countryside, you will live and die such a miserable soul.