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Why Are Kids Sitting At Their Desks In The Middle Of The Road?

Students placed their desks across the road, blocking morning rush hour traffic.
Moses Muoki
/
Kenya's Capital News
Students placed their desks across the road, blocking morning rush hour traffic.

Some schoolkids might be happy if their school were knocked down.

Not in Nairobi.

On May 15, a group of primary school students sat at desks in the center of a main road to block traffic. Along with their parents, they were protesting the demolition of their school, the Kenyatta Golf Course Academy, over the weekend.

According to a BBC article, the schoolchildren chanted: "We want our school, we need to study in school. "

The reason for the demolition was a bit hard to pin down. Foreign Policy writes: "It appears the school was destroyed without any prior warning to parents — who had already paid their children's tuition for the year. The school was on land that belonged to a church, and the school was destroyed without warning on Saturday over a land dispute, though exact details of the dispute weren't made immediately clear."

"The demonstration ended peacefully," the BBC notes — a marked contrast to a demonstration by schoolchildren in Nairobi in 2015. Those youngsters were protesting the fact that their playground had been sold to a developer. At that time, says the BBC, "police fired teargas to disperse protesting schoolchildren."

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Marc Silver
Marc Silver, who edits NPR's global health blog, has been a reporter and editor for the Baltimore Jewish Times, U.S. News & World Report and National Geographic. He is the author of Breast Cancer Husband: How to Help Your Wife (and Yourself) During Diagnosis, Treatment and Beyond and co-author, with his daughter, Maya Silver, of My Parent Has Cancer and It Really Sucks: Real-Life Advice From Real-Life Teens. The NPR story he co-wrote with Rebecca Davis and Viola Kosome -- 'No Sex For Fish' — won a Sigma Delta Chi award for online reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.