At this rate, we will be killing kids for not completing homework

 School children from the Lang'ata road primary school scramble up a bridge

Living, mentally, as they do in the 1930s (when they all had planes and they could slaughter coolies for building a railway line within 10 miles of their verandahs), expatriates are rarely very up to date, and are seldom responsible in their social opinions.

But recently, an event occurred that saw expatriates discussing Kenyan ‘current affairs’ with an enthusiasm they haven’t felt since Isaak Dineson won the Nobel Literature Prize for being patronising about her servants.

This event was the tear-gassing of primary pupils in Lang’ata. Now, most expatriates have a vague idea where Lang’ata is - it’s that bit stuck onto ‘their’ Karen. And while the Kenyan expatriate has almost zero idea of how the Kenyan public school system works, or doesn’t, he does have some quite clear views, bred in him from an early age, about how small children should be treated.

At the very least, the expatriate is of the opinion that the smallest, most vulnerable members of any society shouldn’t be shot at with high-velocity canisters containing powerful chemicals, a set of circumstances that can lead to death. He also worries that such action is only one step away from actually shooting children dead, something that is usually frowned upon in even the most dysfunctional of societies.

There is a danger, given the history of ‘whites’ during the violent colonial period, that certain expatriate teachers in Kenya have started to speculate that these present-day police actions give them some sort of permission to return to dead forms of colonial school punishment. Perhaps, some might propose, it’s now okay for school principals to murder their children for failing to complete homework, or for school assemblies to feature impalements of pupils on the school flagpole for being rude to the rugby coach.

Teachers have always, I imagine, fantasised about lining whole classes up on the school field and shooting them with heavy artillery, and yet in almost all cases, these professionals just about manage to restrain themselves, taking stress upon themselves rather than killing their charges. True, there are reasonably regular, deeply worrying cases in the press of teachers beating pupils to death, but it’s difficult to take the moral high-ground against such child killers when the forces of the law are themselves lobbing teargas into playgrounds.

To be fair, even in the expat’s home culture, there was an age when children were to be ‘seen and not heard.’ But still, he feels justified in pointing out that if, as a society, we don’t work on the violence that led to 2008’s post-election catastrophe, and if we maintain colonial types of discipline for adults in the world and pupils at school, and if we maintain the obsolete mantra of ‘spare the rod, spoil the child,’ we can hardly be surprised when heavily armoured cops start shooting canisters of gas at our offspring. To use an equally old saying that is still relevant, ‘We reap what we sow.’

Enjoy your week, people, and be kind to the kids!

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