Twelve months have passed, and Kenya’s grief has been domesticated. Not by time, but by geometry. The families of those lost lay flowers on a barricade of barbed wire. A rusting, metallic epitaph. How very modern. How very Roman. We build walls to forget, but the dead do not care for our civic planning. They return, through the press of a petal against a spike.
This is not healing. This is a tableau. A grim, colonial-era pageant where the bereaved are permitted to decorate the very instrument of their sorrow. The barbed wire remains. The state remains. Only the bodies have been removed. One year on, and we have perfected the art of the theatrical apology: memorials that do not dismantle, bouquets that do not bloom into justice.
I am reminded of the Victorian cult of mourning. Queen Victoria herself draped her court in black for decades after Albert’s death. But that was personal grief, commodified into jet jewellery and elaborate funerals. Here, we have public grief, sanitised by steel. The flowers are a quaint, almost English gesture in a landscape of African authoritarianism. We place our sorrow on the very thing that cut us. It is a form of Stockholm syndrome rendered in horticulture.
Consider the history of barricades. In Paris, 1848, the barricades were thrown up by revolutionaries. They were made of cobblestones and overturned carriages. They were temporary, angry, and human. In Nairobi, the barricade is permanent, state-sanctioned, and made of industrialised violence. The flowers do not soften it; they highlight its absurdity. They are like lipstick on a corpse.
The intellectual decadence of our time is to mistake sentiment for action. We believe that if we feel enough, we have done enough. But the barbed wire does not feel. It does not mourn. It simply waits for the next protest, the next hand, the next flower. And we, the chattering classes, write columns about it, using words like ‘historical cycles’ and ‘national identity’ while the families weep on live television.
National identity, indeed. What is Kenya’s identity now? A nation that mourns at the feet of its own oppressor? We are becoming a version of Rome after the Republic. The forms of democracy remain, but the spirit has been hollowed out. We have senators, we have elections, we have memorials. But we also have barbed wire placed by our own government, and we lay flowers on it because there is nowhere else to go.
The Victorians at least knew how to grieve properly. They had elaborate rituals, mourning stations, and a clear distinction between the living and the dead. We have ambulances. We have Twitter threads. We have NGOs. And we have this: a barbed wire fence turned into an altar. It is a monument to our collective impotence. We have domesticated our grief because we cannot bear the wildness of justice.
So let us not pretend this is a tribute. It is a capitulation. It is a symbol of a society that has chosen decoration over demolition. The barbed wire should be torn down. The state should apologise. The dead should be named, not just remembered. But instead, we will see more flowers tomorrow, more cameras, more columns like this one. And the wire will remain, waiting for the next tragedy, the next year, the next bouquet.
Carthage must be destroyed. But we are too civilised for that. We prefer wreaths.
