We have arrived at a curious moment in human history. The Kenyan state, a proud product of British legal tradition, has charged a group of students with murder following a school fire that claimed the lives of at least ten children. The prosecution, staffed by men and women trained in the Inns of Court, now invokes the crown’s ancient law to punish adolescent pyromania.
One must ask: what sickness has befallen a society where children burn children alive? The answer, I suspect, lies not in Nairobi but in the moral vacuum that haunts the post-colonial world. We have seen this before.
The late Roman Empire, staggering under the weight of its own sophistication, produced a generation of young barbarians who torched the libraries of Alexandria. Today, Kenya’s schools have become places of terror, where pupils orchestrate massacres with the casual cruelty of gladiators. The prosecutors, in their powdered wigs, believe they can restore order with the lash of the law.
They are mistaken. The fire that consumed that dormitory was not an isolated act of madness; it was a symptom of a deeper decay. When the family unit disintegrates, when fathers are absent and mothers broken by poverty, children raise themselves in a state of nature.
Hobbes’s war of all against all becomes the reality. Britain, in its Victorian heyday, understood this. It exported a civilising mission, a set of values rooted in discipline, duty, and faith.
But those values, like the empire itself, have evaporated. What remains is a hollow procedure, a charade of justice. The students will be tried by British-trained prosecutors, but no London barrister can mend the torn social fabric.
We must look deeper. The intellectual decadence of our age has taught us to blame everything on colonialism while ignoring the moral collapse that followed independence. The Kenyan elite, educated at Oxford and Harvard, preach human rights but neglect the basic duty of raising their own children.
They are the new patricians, utterly disconnected from the mob they pretend to lead. And what of the mob? The students, of course, are victims too.
Not of poverty alone, but of a culture that has lost its reverence for life. When Western media glorifies violence, when smartphones replace parental guidance, when the concept of sin is mocked, the result is a generation of sociopaths. I shall not weep for the defendants.
But I do weep for the dead. Their blood cries out, not just for vengeance, but for a rebirth of the old virtues. Virtues that Kenya, like the rest of the Anglosphere, has forgotten.
The British-trained prosecutors might secure convictions. They might hang the guilty. But the fire will burn again, unless we admit that the problem is not just criminal, but civilisational.
