One year on, and Kenya's streets are again a theatre of the absurd. Protesters, undeterred by the memory of live rounds and tear gas, mark the anniversary of their uprising with an incongruous symbol: flowers on barbed wire. The image is almost Victorian in its ghastly romanticism, a gesture that belongs more to the drawing rooms of 19th-century poets than to 21st-century African politics.
Yet here we are. The British government, ever the hectoring schoolmaster, calls for calm. But calm is a luxury for those who have already won.
For those still fighting, it is a prison. The cycle of violence and half-hearted reform has become a grim ritual. One thinks of Rome's bread and circuses, only here the bread is absent and the circuses are funerals.
Until the Kenyan elite realise that stability cannot be purchased with occasional concessions and a few flower petals, the barbed wire will remain. And the flowers will wilt.
