The images from Nairobi are devastating. A mother, her wails piercing the morning air, cradling the bloodied corpse of her son. This is the human cost of a protest gone wrong, set against the backdrop of a suspected Ebola outbreak. The irony is as sharp as a Roman gladius: British aid teams, dispatched to combat a viral threat, now find themselves helpless witnesses to a different kind of contagion—the contagion of social breakdown.
Let us be clear. This is not merely a public health crisis. It is a failure of statecraft, a collapse of the delicate contract between citizen and government. The protest, born of fear and distrust, has metastasised into violence. And in that violence, we see the barbarism that lurks just beneath the thin veneer of civilisation. The mother’s grief is a mirror held up to our own complacency. We in the West, with our sterile hospitals and orderly queues, imagine that such horrors are the stuff of distant newsreels. But history teaches us that order is a fragile thing. It can shatter in a heartbeat, whether from plague, riot, or the slow decay of institutions.
Consider the parallels to the Fall of Rome. There, too, the empire was beset by disease—the Antonine Plague—and by waves of internal unrest. The elite retreated into their villas, much as our aid teams now retreat into their compounds. They monitored the chaos, dispatching reports and supplies, but they could not stem the tide. The lesson is that force must be met with force, but also with legitimacy. A government that cannot command trust will find its authority eroded, and with it, the very fabric of society.
What, then, is to be done? First, we must resist the temptation to sentimentalise. This is not a story of noble victims and evil oppressors. It is a story of collective failure. The Kenyan government has failed to quell the unrest. The protesters have failed to channel their anger constructively. And we, the international community, have failed to provide a coherent response beyond the dispatch of medical teams. We have become spectators to our own irrelevance.
Second, we must recognise that the Ebola threat is a symptom, not the cause. The real disease is a crisis of governance. The outbreak has exposed the fragility of the healthcare system, but the protest has exposed something deeper: a loss of faith in the ability of the state to protect its citizens. When trust evaporates, violence fills the void. This is a historical constant, from the bread riots of Imperial Rome to the cholera epidemics of Victorian London.
Finally, we must ask ourselves: what does this mean for the United Kingdom? Our aid teams are on the ground, but their role must be reconsidered. They cannot be mere observers. They must become active agents in rebuilding the social contract. This means engaging with local leaders, addressing the grievances that fuel unrest, and insisting on accountability. It means moving beyond the clinical and into the political. Hard as it may be, we cannot quarantine ourselves from the world’s disorders. The plague of misrule is contagious.
The mother in Nairobi will bury her son. The protests will subside or escalate. The Ebola virus will be contained or will spread. But the deeper lesson remains: order is not natural. It is a creation of will and wisdom, and it must be defended with every tool at our disposal. If we fail to learn that lesson, we will find ourselves, not as monitors of tragedy, but as its victims.
