When Britain’s colonial adventurers first proposed linking the Swahili coast with Africa’s equatorial heart, opponents dubbed the planned railway “the Lunatic Line” and a hostile member of parliament quipped that it “started from nowhere and nobody wanted to use it. It went nowhere and nobody wanted to come back by it”.

The Kenya crisis shows how wrong those 19th-century sceptics were. If the railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria is a shadow of its former self, the nation itself, with its port, roads and airports, today serves as a giant gateway to central Africa. And the violence that has racked Kenya since last month’s disputed elections is already having drastic repercussions on the region, throwing into embarrassing relief the woeful state of its infrastructure.