The Posh School's Burden

Boarding schools that once trained young men to run the British Empire are opening campuses for elites in countries with reputations for corruption and long colonial pasts. It could get awkward

- Simon Akam

On a Friday afternoon in late 2018, children gathered on an artificial-grass pitch in Kazakhstan’s former capital of Almaty. In the distance, beyond the hangarlike buildings of their school, the Trans-Ili Alatau Mountains were snowcapped. On the other side rose the glass-walled Ritz-Carlton hotel complex. Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie blared from the PA.

The occasion was a soccer tournament like many the world over, but, Shakira notwithstanding, this one had a determinedly British bent. The competition was between houses—student groupings traditional in English private education. Pagodas by the pitch bore the signature colors of the Bartle Frere, Edmonstone, Kipling, and Attlee houses. The first two were named for 19th century administrators of British India. The third honored Rudyard Kipling, author of the imperialist panegyric The White Man’s Burden. The last was named for Clement Attlee, the prime minister who established Britain’s National Health Service. All four men attended the English private school Haileybury or its antecedents.

The tourney was taking place at Haileybury Almaty, the first of two Kazakh franchises that have opened since 2008. The move had some strange historical resonances. Haileybury, descended from the East India College, is arguably the school most closely associated with Britain’s imperial past. Kazakhstan, meanwhile, is a vast autocracy, flush with petrodollars yet free for less than three decades after more than a century of near-unbroken Russian or Soviet rule. Out on the AstroTurf, a girl with braces waved a Kipling House banner bearing a hand-drawn hammer and sickle. The poet would no doubt have blanched at the image: When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, he wrote that one-sixth of the world had “passed bodily out of civilisation.”