An underground economy built around the Kenyans ghost-writing essays for more privileged college students is brought into the light in Eloïse King’s “The Shadow Scholars,” a documentary executive produced by Steve McQueen that plays this week at the Joburg Film Festival.
The London-born director’s feature debut is a revealing portrait of the multibillion-dollar “fake essay” industry that employs an estimated 40,000 Kenyans — highly educated, chronically underemployed individuals making ends meet by writing academic papers for students across the globe.
The film chronicles the daily lives of several writers juggling day jobs and parenting duties as they work tirelessly to meet academic deadlines overseas, while posing questions about “the power of visibility, and who gets seen and who doesn’t,” according to King.
“There are lots of incredibly talented, intelligent, and wonderful people [in Kenya], but are they getting the opportunities?” she says.
“The Shadow Scholars,” which premiered at the Intl. Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), where Variety‘s Guy Lodge praised it as an “engrossing, morally nuanced film,” works off the research of Patricia Kingori, a Kenyan-born, U.K.-based sociologist who in 2021 became the youngest Black person ever to be awarded a full professorship at Oxford.
Speaking to Variety ahead of the Joburg Film Festival, King describes how Kingori approached her around 2019 with the news of a U.K. labor index that described a booming “fake essay” industry operating out of Kenya. “My immediate reaction to that was: How do real people write fake essays? What are we talking about?” she says.
The duo set off to Nairobi to investigate, with Kingori serving as the “conduit” that allowed the filmmaker access into the secretive world. But while King was convinced that they would stumble upon willing subjects in the industry’s thousands-strong Kenyan workforce, the pair immediately ran into resistance. The writers they encountered in Nairobi, she says, “had concerns about not only stigmatization within their own communities, but the increasing clampdowns that were happening from a legislative perspective.”
To address those concerns, the director used AI-assisted “digital veils” that slightly blur their facial features to obscure their identities. The technology, she says, produces an “uncanny valley effect” that suggests there’s “something that’s not quite right” happening on screen. In the process, it also reflects the filmmaker’s “frustrations that these people were being kept at a distance, and they couldn’t really claim full recognition for their work because of the systems that prevail.”
“The Shadow Scholars” largely sidelines the students who are passing off the Kenyan writers’ work as their own; the film features testimony from just a single American undergraduate, whose complaints of parental pressure and the soaring costs of higher education — not to mention the mental toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, when parts of the documentary were filmed — are framed in a sympathetic light. (“We didn’t want to necessarily villainize the people who were cheating,” King says.)
Instead, the film focuses on the “intellectual prowess of the people who were doing this work, and their capacity to produce authentic — or should I say bespoke — original work over and over again,” says King. Though most “recognize that there is a moral injustice in them doing work that they won’t get recognition for,” she adds, they appear more inclined to center their own agency in providing a sought-after service in the global marketplace. “They are responding to a demand for this,” she says.
“The Shadow Scholars” deftly fits the “fake essay” industry into an older tradition of exploitation in Africa, from slavery through the colonial era to modern times, perpetuating systems that allow for “the extraction of ideas from the global South to the global North,” says King. As Kingori ruefully notes in one of the film’s many reflective scenes: “They want our ideas. They just don’t want us.”
Born in Kenya, the professor has several there-but-for-the-grace-of-God moments in the film. Her sense of injustice is profound, as she speculates on the systemic failures that allow students in more privileged societies to profit off the toil of her countrymen. “Imagine what Kenya would be like if all that writing was in the name of Kenyans and not somebody else,” she tearfully muses. It’s a poignant example of what King describes as her mission not to “disprove the systems so much as reimagine collective narratives full of possibility.”
“It’s much more about how these narratives might have existed,” she says. “What is this alternative narrative, and as a Black diaspora or marginalized group, what can we gain from understanding these histories that may have been played down or completely erased? What do they allow us to imagine about our collective possibility?”
The Joburg Film Festival runs March 11 – 16.
