Let us not pretend we are shocked. The report from Mogadishu, in which a former child soldier recounts the trauma of being forced to kill or be killed, is merely the latest dispatch from a continent we have long consigned to the realm of savagery. But this is not merely a story of African tragedy; it is a mirror held up to our own civilisation’s decay.
The 21st century, for all its technological marvels, has produced nothing more than a new generation of barbarians trained to wield AK-47s instead of learning their times tables. We wring our hands over student loan debts and avocado toast while children in Somalia are handed machetes and told their only way out is through blood. The ‘kill or be killed’ mantra is not just the law of the jungle; it is the logical endpoint of a world order that has abandoned the very concept of a civilising mission.
We have retreated into our gated communities of the mind, content to let the dark continents tear themselves apart while we debate the nuances of pronouns. The fall of Rome was not a single cataclysm but a slow rot, same as ours. And these child soldiers are the visigoths at the gates, not because they are evil, but because we have made them so.
The only difference between their nightmare and ours is that they face the bullets while we face the bill for the therapy. So spare me the outraged headlines and the charity telethons. The real scandal is not that a child was forced to become a killer, but that we have ensured his torment will be the defining image of our age.
