“I don’t want passive viewing”: how The Shadow Scholars goes inside the academic cheating industry

Thirty-seven million students worldwide are engaged in the multi-billion-dollar world of ‘contract cheating’ – the practise of paying people to write their coursework and essays. Former Vice and i-D producer Eloise King’s debut feature examines the question from the perspective of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’, the writers whose livelihoods depend on their ability to pen essays on demand and at short notice. 

King was introduced to the concept through the work of her friend Dr Patricia Kingori, a British-Kenyan academic who is the youngest woman and youngest Black professor in Oxford’s 925-year history. The film’s boldness is in its refusal to simplify what is complex, creatively using face veils for the Kenyan writers, both to protect their identity and to complicate the perceived illegality of their work, which is now criminalised in the UK and Australia. Meanwhile, the students purchasing essays, rather than writing them, are not being penalised.

Elhum Shakerifar: I’m struck by the way your film retains a deeply personal heart at the same time as being a far-reaching geopolitical investigation on the commodification of learning and structural disparities. How were these elements woven together?

Eloise King: Working multiple jobs to put myself through university, I became the first in my immediate family to attend university. Like the Kenyan writers Mercy, Chege and Emmanuel in the film, I grew up clinging to an unshakable truth: that education could be both a weapon and sanctuary against systemic violence. Mercy was the top in her class but here she is supporting others to get degrees, while her own career progression has stalled. I wanted to understand the conditions that made it possible. I saw the global scale of this paradox. Brilliant minds commodified by the same university systems that exclude them. 

Patricia Kingori’s research on ‘fakes, fabrications and falsehoods’ opened the door and crystallised this further, revealing how Western academia extracts intellectual labour from the Global South while denying the real authors like Chege the credit. 

There is a sense that [US based] students like Kate, who features in the film, are stuck without the services of the writers, and for the Global North to progress they have to hide the reflection, or the shadows, because it helps to maintain this idea of superiority which justifies the binaries, between the first and the developing world, the experts and the fakes. 

The Shadow Scholars project became a way to re-write the propaganda of an incapable Africa – not just as systemic failures, but as lived realities connecting Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s critiques of colonialism with Patricia’s journey and the Kenyan writers’ commitment to reclaim their place in the story of knowledge.

Ethics, AI, technology, responsibility and colonial legacies are in fascinating conversation throughout the film. The dreamlike quality of the image – dotted with doppelgängers, doublespeak and historical snapshots – underlines the thwarted possibility of another world. The question of co-creation is reflected through Kingori herself – by stepping into frame as a central character, she invites us to consider documentary ethics as a colonial legacy as strong as the labour extractivism at the heart of the film.

I don’t want passive viewing. I think if we’re going to re-imagine these systems there is going to need to be work, a co-creation ethic. Patricia was never going to be in the film; it was [encouraged by] a conversation with Patricia Richards-Leader MBE [Patricia’s mum], who rather masterfully pointed out “if your research asks questions of others, asks them to share vulnerable and intimate insights into their lives, why are you not willing to do this yourself?” 

Being the deeply empathetic and brave person Patricia is, she confronted this unequal dynamic, very much in the spirit of not asking collaborators to give what you’re not prepared to give yourself into her approach, and became an onscreen contributor. I think the longstanding relationship of trust and respect she and I had offered a space of support and opportunity too, and I took that responsibility really seriously.

Another space of power is of course the archive. In the film, the archive prises open a perspective on Kenya that is both culturally rich and marked by colonial presence. How did you source this material? 

The archive was a particularly big challenge. At first, I wanted to circumvent Pathé entirely because I liked the idea of the archival being a deeper reflection of Kenya’s perspectives rather than the British gaze. But this was very difficult for a number of reasons, including the British control of image-making and the Hanslope disclosure in which British colonial archives were destroyed, hidden and manipulated. Known as Operation Legacy in the 1950s, the British colonial administration in Kenya destroyed much of the documentation relating to the Emergency prior to their departure in 1963. After independence, many countries didn’t want to inherit these archives or know what to do with them [because of the gaze they represented] or questioned the value of preserving them. 

An important connection [for our film] was the archive run by Salmin Amin, whose father was the acclaimed Kenyan photographer Mohamed ‘Mo’ Amin MBE. Amin’s filming of Michael Buerk’s report of the 1984 Ethiopian famine brought international attention to the crisis and eventually helped start the charity wave that resulted in Live Aid concerts. 

Anyway, this was one way to subvert the gaze as well as trying to really work with the rhythm of the archival footage and put traditional practices alongside the technological innovations of the satellite station, the universities and graduates in the 1960s on equal terms, while making the violence of the British presence in the region clear.

The late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s contribution underlines the ongoing relevance of his seminal 1986 book Decolonising the Mind. The shadow scholars writing essays for students in the Global North are both a form of ‘normalised abnormality’ and somehow also something more complex, because the scholars are not given power or possibility for their intellectual abilities. Why did it feel important to weave Thiong’o’s voice into the film?

I felt we needed a provocation, a philosophy to guide us, that deepened the thesis of our film. Professor Kingori had written an essay on Ngũgĩ’s story ‘Without a Shadow of a Doubt’, a playful allegory in which he and his brother investigated the ontology of ‘the shadow’. When I reached out to Ngũgĩ’ he graciously accepted the invitation to be interviewed but did not know about the work of the shadow scholars so we were introducing the concept to him during that conversation – he was ruminating on it in real-time in the film. 

Of his refusal to write in English he said: “It goes back to speaking one’s own language, practicing one’s own culture, investing in what is inherently yours, not what has been falsely given back to you. Or, what oppressed peoples around the world have learned: that colonial forces want what you produce, not who you are.” 

When we filmed Ngũgĩ’s interview the room fell into a hushed silence, everyone of the Kenyan crew had learned his work in school and there was a significance to his inclusion that went beyond his presence on screen. I wanted the film to feel symbolically Kenyan and the inclusion of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s seemed like a critical evocation of an awareness and resistance to the colonial project and legacy.

The Shadow Scholars, backed by the BFI Doc Society Fund, is in select UK cinemas from 16 September and on Channel 4 on 24 September at 10pm