Being successful at Siriana meant “lick[ing] the boots” of people higher up in the hierarchy. To do this, successful Black students like Chui learned to quote William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), England’s most famous playwright, and to play football (i.e., soccer), a game very popular at English private schools. Siriana’s focus on English literature and sports suggests that it was conditioning the Kenyan students to view English culture as superior. Thus, Siriana represents the way colonialism miseducated Kenyan people into viewing English culture and white people as inherently more valuable than Kenyan culture and Black people. The other students liked Chui because he could beat white people at white people’s own games; his nickname “Joe Louis” refers to the African American boxer Joe Louis, who in a 1938 rematch famously defeated the Nazi-backed German boxer Max Schmeling, whom the Nazi press claimed could never lose to a Black person.