The answer cannot be found only in courtrooms. It is also found in what happens when an ordinary Kenyan challenges an administrative decision, demands information from a public institution, encounters the police, seeks a government service or insists that the state treat them according to the rights guaranteed to them.

Perhaps the Luo voter doesn't need another political messiah. We already had that in Baba. The tragedy is that after his death, the Luo voter has not yet learnt that losing a shepherd does not mean losing their ability to find their own way.

We spend a great deal of time talking about how, when and why women should get married. We talk about dating, beauty, femininity, fertility, compromise, being a “good woman” and finding a man who is ready to settle down. We rarely spend the same amount of time asking what a woman is expected to surrender once she has acquired the title she was encouraged to desire.

The problem is not that young people have forgotten. It is that too few of us have been taught what came before. History and Government is treated as an elective in our schools, even though understanding a nation's past is as essential to citizenship as reading or writing. A society that leaves its history to choice should not be surprised when collective memory begins to fade.

But the Creator instinctively knew that would be a waste of time. As time would demonstrate, corporal punishment, or the rod if you may – and counselling – are ineffectual when certain children mysteriously develop a trouble-causing worm in their brains. They will swallow intoxicants, stick syringes into the veins, bum, fight and drop out of school, wander into crime and seek death, sex and its diseases with a vengeance. You will cry, curse, whip them, call the police, take them to the witchdoctor, and it will do you and them no good.

"The Art Deco Buildings of Nairobi" is the latest work by South African writer Barbara Adair. More than a study of architecture, the book documents the memories and histories of Nairobi's African Asian communities, particularly Indian Kenyan families who transformed Art Deco designs into spaces that reflected their own traditions, aspirations and ways of life.