So a Kenyan cabinet minister has blocked an American-funded quarantine centre, citing ‘sovereignty’. And the British aid chief wrings his hands about Ebola menacing the Commonwealth. This is rich.
Let’s be honest: the real panic here is not about a haemorrhagic fever, but about the slow-motion collapse of the post-colonial humanitarian order. We are watching a rerun of the Boer War-era quarantine scares in South Africa, mixed with the 1890s ‘Yellow Peril’ paranoia of the European powers. The minister’s action is not a rational health measure, but a symbolic punch at the West’s sense of moral superiority.
It is the kind of gratuitous obstruction that the Victorians would have labelled ‘insolence’ and punished with a gunboat. Today, we call it ‘diplomacy’ and pretend not to notice the contempt. The British aid chief’s fear is real, but it is a fear of irrelevance.
If Ebola were to spread from a blocked quarantine centre, the blame would not fall on the Kenyan minister. It would fall on the dead hand of the West, which can no longer enforce even the most basic health logistics in its own sphere of influence. This is the natural end of the liberal international order: a series of squalid little squabbles about who gets to build what, while the rats of history run through the collapsing rafters.
The tragedy is that the minister’s gambit will work. It will be celebrated as a victory for ‘African solutions’. But the disease, if it comes, will not respect these infantile gestures.
It will hit the poor hardest, as always. And the British aid chief will be left to write another letter to the Times, lamenting the fall of standards. The lesson?
The British Empire was terrible, but it at least knew how to manage a quarantine. We have replaced a competent imperialism with a chaotic nationalism, and we call it ‘progress.
