The images streaming out of Nyeri County in central Kenya are haunting: a smouldering dormitory block, a scatter of textbooks turned to ash, and the grim task of counting bodies. Sixteen pupils, most of them aged between nine and thirteen, have perished in a fire that ripped through the Hillside Endarasha Academy in the dead of night. The blaze, which began in the boys’ dormitory shortly before midnight, has left a community in mourning and a nation asking uncomfortable questions about the safety of its schoolchildren.
For those of us who observe the intersection of tragedy and social infrastructure, this is a painfully familiar story. School fires are a recurrent horror in Kenya. In 2017, a fire at Moi Girls School killed ten. In 2001, 67 students died at Kyanguli Secondary School. In each case, the pattern repeats like a grotesque reel: overcrowded dormitories, locked exits, insufficient firefighting equipment, and a tangle of blame that rarely leads to systemic change.
On the ground, the human cost is immediate and visceral. Parents have spent the past 24 hours gathered at the school gates, many still in pyjamas, clutching photographs of their children. Some have collapsed upon learning the worst. One father, a farmer named Joseph Kariuki, told local reporters that he had spoken to his son on the phone the night before. "He said he was scared of the dark," Kariuki said. "I told him to pray. Now I have to pray for his soul." The intimacy of that grief is what makes statistics become real. Sixteen families are now navigating a void.
But beyond the individual tragedy lies a cultural shift that is long overdue. Kenya prides itself on its education system, one of the most robust in East Africa. Yet the safety of its children is routinely compromised by lax enforcement of building codes and a failure to equip schools with basic fire prevention measures. In many rural boarding schools, dormitories are old structures with narrow corridors, mesh windows that cannot be opened, and padlocked doors designed to keep students in rather than intruders out. The psychology of control, which prizes discipline over safety, is woven into the architecture.
There is also a class dimension. Hillside Endarasha Academy is a mixed day and boarding school in a relatively modest area. The children who died were largely from lower-income families who had entrusted their sons to the school in the hope of a better future. In wealthier private schools, fire drills are routine, extinguishers are checked, and evacuation plans are posted on walls. The tragedy at Hillside exposes a two-tier system of safety, one that tracks along economic lines.
As the investigation begins, attention will turn to the school’s management and the Kenya Ministry of Education. But the deeper question is why these preventable incidents keep happening. The answer lies in a culture of impunity and a society that struggles to prioritise the safety of its most vulnerable. Until that changes, the ashes of Hillside Endarasha will join the long list of memorials that demand, but rarely receive, a meaningful response.
