In a not-distant world that current events have made to seem so far away, Uhuru, Jomo Kenyatta and Mau Mau were bugbear buzzwords in the West. Largely now forgotten despite continued relevance, the Kenyan freedom fighter-terrorists are resuscitated today, and for today, in Justin Chadwick’s The First Grader.

That the hundred-three-minute “based on a true story” is brought out by National Geographic Entertainment is not the surprise it might appear. It professes itself “heart warming and inspiring,” and flashback memories of the 1950s Kikuyu tribe atrocities against white colonists are airbrushed, the torture and murder that keep this feel-good from being fare for children laid only to British soldiers and their red-fezzed native flunkies.

A South African based in Los Angeles, scriptwriter Ann Peacock took her cue from Robyn Dixon’s article of the same title. The newspaper piece concerned Kimani N’gan’ga Maruge (1920-2009), who seven years ago became a Guinness record-holder as the oldest person to attend primary school, a first film rôle done with dignity by Kenyan television news anchor Oliver Musila Litondo.

The media plays its part not so much in the international reporters who momentarily swarm around the “human interest” aspect, as in radio DJ Masha (Daniel Ndambuki) who functions as semi-chorus, announces Nairobi’s free education proclamation that sets all in motion, and periodically cheerleads to fill in exposition.

As strong-willed as Maruge, Jane Obinchu (London-born Cambridge honors graduate Naomie Harris) is principal of the basic rural school to which the man hobbles to claim his right to literacy. He wants to read official correspondence to ex-internee 4339, more a story ploy than a necessity, and it will take a while to understand that he unfolds the letter alone with a calico cat and that the slim wife (Emily Njoki) and daughters are memories from the octogenarian’s young manhood (Lwander Jawar).

SPOILER ALERT

Turned away at the gate, he ignores drinking village cronies and returns in shoes, high socks, second-hand trousers cut into shorts, and a cloth scholar’s satchel. He insists he has fought for his country, and Jane is moved to admit him into the jammed class of six-year-olds (played by on-location Rift Valley students who had never before seen a camera or TV set). Poor eyesight and hearing require his sitting nearer the front, and, when he panics at a pencil sharpener, a flashback discloses what he will not -- British interrogation during which a pencil was used to perforate his eardrum.

He perseveres, soon accepted by classmates whom he leads in old freedom chants but hesitates explaining his metal Mau Mar bracelet. At first dubious, assistant teachers Alfred and Elizabeth (Alfred Munyua and Shoki Mokgapa) come to admire him, while he and Jane form a bond in the face of opposition from pompous officialdom (Vusumuzi “Vusi” Michael Kunene, as local superintendant Mr. Kipruto), village parents fearing their own children are being shortchanged, and local louts urged to slander and incipient violence by the father of “backward” student Kamau Chege (Kamau Mbaya).

Jane is making a sacrifice in not joining company-man husband Charles (Tony Kgoroge) in the city. Her person, marriage and reputation threatened, her appeal turned down by the national board, and politicians strong-arming for a cut of rumored compensation to former Mau Maus, she tutors Maruge and takes him on as an assistant but is transferred three hundred miles away, leaving him to an adult center where bored citified teens have no respect for learning.

Flashbacks to the 1952-60 state of emergency are personal, not historical, and Magube’s explanation to his classmates is brief, that they had fought for their land. The uprising in the “white highlands” was among the earlier modern campaigns of terrorizing non-military populations, which the film sidesteps in its one instance where only rifles are stolen while a white woman is unaware and untouched on the estate. Focus is on the young Magube’s refusal to renounce his insurgent oath, itself a prelude to the old Magube’s refusal to abandon his quest for freedom through education, the hope for the nation and its children and, thus, its future.

Selected at Telluride, Toronto and London, The First Grader skirts the saccharine pitfalls of inspirational films. Never too late, it would show, to “overcome the burdens of [the individual and collective] past.”

(Released by National Geographic Entertainment and rated "PG-13" for some disturging violent content and brief nudity.)