The Shadow Scholars

By now, everybody has heard of the Nigerian Prince and associated advance-fee scams on the Internet aimed at defrauding the victim. It is probably the most popular underground Internet activity associated with parts of Africa. But there is another one, involving the writing of academic essays for students abroad. That’s the one under examination in The Shadow Scholars, an engaging documentary by Eloise King.

Obviously, a key distinction concerns consent. The Nigerian Prince isn’t exactly looking to make his victim’s life better. By contrast, the “contract cheater” is engaged in an activity that is supposed to propel his client to the next step as a person and/or as a professional. In King’s telling, the men and women who engage in this sub-legal activity are not criminals. They are brilliant people who have figured out a way to eke out a living in Kenya, a country that doesn’t have jobs for its graduates.

King herself doesn’t appear on the screen. Her surrogate is the Oxford professor Patricia Kingori, upon whose research the documentary is based. Kingori is a warm presence on the screen and it is a cool coup that King gets her to join the film. In a film populated by invisible Africans, it is a boon that this one successful African is very visible. It is also very much an inspired choice that, in a reversal of the world inhabited by these writers and their clients, only the Kenyans are shown. We hear chiefly from the clients through onscreen text and via audio recordings. Kingori, as an onscreen middleman, mediates between both parties, although her loyalties are clear: she is very interested in the workings of the Kenyan community of shadows.

She leads the viewer into that community, members of which have their faces disguised using AI. This becomes the film’s only acknowledgment of the not-quite-legal nature of the work these contractors are engaged in. Otherwise, The Shadow Scholars is a valorisation of these anonymous people. Which, from a moral standpoint, is problematic. But that is only a part of the problem of the politics of The Shadow Scholars.

At one point, Kingori says, “If the writers were writing as themselves and getting those opportunities as themselves, it will completely reshape the world”. It is an interesting statement that is followed up with one of the contract writers saying, “We are way better than those we are writing for.”

Clever editing aside, that is a rather delusional statement. But the film is structured in such a way that some viewers might end up agreeing with this opinion.

There is no doubt that these Kenyan writers are great at figuring out what Western examiners want to see, but to suggest that they are superior to those they are writing for is at best patronising or, at worst, silly. Essay writing may be hard but it is just one part of what it means to be an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or, who knows, a rocket scientist. There are hours spent in labs using equipment that very few Africans have ever seen, there are days spent in classrooms talking to lecturers, there are the wonderful interactions that a campus provides — all of these are necessary parts of what it takes to be a graduate and, eventually, a professional. You write a paper “in partial fulfillment of the requirements”.

King and Kingori, who is as academic as anyone could ever hope to be, know this. But there is no pushback in the choices the film makes. And so, a large part of the story ends up as part of an ongoing crusade that brings together the guilt-ridden liberal and the model minority seeking to elevate their home country.

Both can be well-meaning but good intentions have no real connection to truth. And truth in this case is simple: both the shadow scholar and the actual student scholar are engaged in unethical activity. Everything else is merely cosmetic — or academic — if the filmmaker and her professorial subject do not address the foundational problem: why is writing invisibly for a Western student more attractive than getting a job in Kenya? And if there are no jobs in Kenya, why is that the case?

To answer these questions is to look at the Kenyan state and poke it in the eye with the truth: the government has failed its youth. Colonialism has its consequences but the UK is not the immediate reason East Africa is failing its young people.

Also, for a documentary that gives us a lot of numbers — the industry is worth billions; about 50,000 people are engaged in this activity, etc. — why isn’t there a consideration of the platforms that make academic essay writing possible? Social media platforms where some of these services are advertised are worth billions of dollars. Upwork, a place where essay writers can connect with their clients, had freelancer bills reaching a billion dollars in 2017.

A weighty exploration of the economics of contract cheating will have to ask one question: Why aren’t any of the biggest platforms owned and operated by Africans based in Africa? You can argue, as the documentary does, that shadow scholars are the brains behind some of the successful university graduates in the US, UK, and Europe, but if their brains haven’t led them to figure out how to earn the most value from their brilliance, then asking why is a good idea.

One-half of the answer will surely lead to accounting for how the world of entrepreneurship is shaped in favour of already rich countries. The other half will point the filmmaker and her subject to the complicity of African leadership in failing to create an atmosphere where its horde of brilliant people can direct their own economic destinies on its own platforms. You get the sense watching The Shadow Scholars that only the first half of that answer is worthy of consideration. In this case, the documentary, as important as it is, is the sort that has chosen a side and cannot be seen to show how that side has contributed to the system that has led to the invisibility of its own people.

Away from this rather complex problem at the core of Shadow Scholars, there is a reflection on the nature of the immigrant experience and its pressures. Kingori is vastly accomplished — she is one of Oxford’s youngest professors and the youngest black one ever — and we are shown how that came to be. Her mother wanted it for her and did her very best to be able to make it happen. As the older woman puts it, if a parent puts in 110 percent, the child would have to get to 120 percent.

There isn’t an overt link in the documentary’s narrative framing, but one can’t help but see a similar thing happening in Kenya with one of the shadow scholars and her inquisitive daughter. The mother hustles to provide for her sharp daughter — but unless that child gets to go to Oxford or a similar academic haven in the West, there is almost zero chance of anyone making a documentary about her work in the future.

The Shadow Scholars draws us into thinking that the situation is largely the fault of the West — someone might raise a student who would one day pay this child a few dollars per page to write an academic essay and then take out her name. But if you watch closely, you’ll find that the child’s home country, Kenya, is just as guilty in the erasure of its citizen’s name from her accomplishment. The motivation to write invisibly for another’s academic progress would decline if Africa had its own Oxford. And the kid would earn more if the platform for contract writing was something she herself created. But that’s unlikely to happen if she never leaves Kenya.

All of this means that there is a large audience for The Shadow Scholars after its festival run at IDFA 2024 and elsewhere. That audience would be made up of the Africa-patronising Westerner and the West-blaming African, wherever such kindred spirits may be found.