Children saved land by acting unreasonably

A children’s crusade?

History records that one day in May 1212, a shepherd boy aged about 12 years appeared before King Philip of France with a letter purportedly authored by Jesus Christ himself.

In the letter, Jesus had allegedly asked the boy to “go and preach the Crusade”. In the child’s mind, he was to marshal a band of children to go and rescue Christendom from the threat posed by the Saracens. The king, in his wisdom, dismissed the child and told him to go home.

The boy, called Stephen, and originating from a small town called Cloyes, went out to the countryside preaching his message, and eventually managed to convince thousands of children to march with him.

Around the same time, it is reported, another boy called Nicholas from a Rhineland village in Germany embarked on a similar mission. Again, thousands of children were recruited into the cause of fighting for Christendom.

All the various accounts of these expeditions agree that the missions ended either catastrophically at worst, or in ignominy at best. However, a message was passed to the adults of the time that the children perceived an existential threat to their way of life, and that while the adults preferred to sit pretty and let things take their course, the children would take things into their own hands and deal with the problem.

My reading of these events is that the society was so far gone that children felt that they had to fight wars whose origins they knew little about.

The wrong-headedness of their mission can only be attributed to the dominant message in most of Europe at the time, that the great apocalypse was approaching and that Christians had to fight to save their faith from being overrun by a newer religion.

But their determination to fight clearly came from a conviction that the adults had failed, and children remained the last bastion of the faith.
Kenya today appears to be approaching a similar place in her history.

KEEP QUITE AND DO NOTHING

The children of Langata Road Primary School last Monday poured out of their classrooms and brought down a wall that had been built by some shadowy characters attempting to grab a playground at the school.

This was the culmination of several weeks of attempts by the school administration and politicians from the area to seek redress from the relevant authorities.

The children seem to have appreciated that if they decided to keep quiet and do nothing, corruption and impunity would reign supreme, and soon there would be no school to speak of.

As a matter of fact, the action by the children of Langata Road served as a warning to other unscrupulous “private developers” all over the country who are eying school plots for grabbing. If the adults will let you get away with it, the children will tear down the walls and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

This state of affairs can only come to pass in a country with a decaying legal justice system, where there is little hope of protection for the innocents facing the onslaught of the corruption juggernaut.

In a country where the responsible authorities ignore legitimate pleas for action against thuggery, it might indeed take the screams of little boys and girls to bring the point home.

As it is, the children saved their playground by acting unreasonably. Are the adults playing their part?

Prof Lukoye Atwoli is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Dean, Moi University School of Medicine [email protected]