Kenya has occupied a treasured place in Africa in the minds of many outsiders. It was not, until this week, a country that flashed red on the map and certainly not one where women and children fled murderous mobs only to be burnt alive in church.

Rather, in the western imagination it was where the azure waters of the Indian Ocean meet breathtaking landscapes dotted with majestic fauna; where the best hospitality in Africa can be found in hotels, and a robust private sector has been built with the sweat of generations of Kenyans and Kenyan Asians. At the centre of east Africa’s trading and transport links, it was also the most important – and it seemed most resilient – of the mere handful of sub-Saharan countries to have survived the aftermath of colonial rule without a major episode of bloodletting.