School is officially back in session at Garissa University College, nine months after Somali gunmen stormed this public university in northeastern Kenya, killing nearly 150 people. 

Staff and students began arriving on Monday, with classes scheduled to resume next week

To bolster security, the school now features an on-campus police post, and a perimeter fence is in the works, according to university principal Ahmed Osman Warfa.

“We worked extremely hard to have the only university in Northeastern opened in Garissa,” Warfa told Nairobi newspaper The Star. “We shall not allow small boys running around with guns to scare us.” 

Before dawn on April 2, a small group of Islamist militants ambushed the school, roving from building to building and reportedly targeting Christians before Kenyan authorities arrived and killed the attackers. 

Somali terrorist organization al Shabaab, an affiliate of al Qaeda, took credit for the attack. The school’s proximity to the Somali border and willingness to admit non-Muslim students made it a prime target for the jihadist group, which has been seeking to reclaim the region from the Kenyan government and expel non-Muslims for years. 

Not every student who survived the April attack will return. Many have since transferred to other schools, and school officials expect the university’s enrollment to decline from around 800 before the attacks to under 100, at least initially. 

But in choosing to return despite the continued threat of violence in the region, each and every person who sets foot on campus is sending a message to those who seek to stamp out progress and stoke religious intolerance: The hatred and bigotry expressed by a few extremists can never trump the determination and decency embodied by the vast majority of Kenyans.

The triumphant return of a school after a terror attack is especially powerful because education is often regarded as key to stopping the spread of extremist ideologies in the first place.

Garissa University College’s grand reopening represents something else, as well: a return to normalcy. No matter where they strike or whom they target, acts of terror force an initial, violent break from the norm. Sometimes, the most powerful act of resilience in the aftermath of a terror attack is to simply reclaim, as best as possible, life’s everyday patterns and habits. That’s why Parisians flocked to sidewalk cafés as an act of defiance after the November ISIS attacks, and New Yorkers turned a simple baseball game into a symbol of American fortitude after 9/11. 

Fellow Kenyans and other wellwishers took to Twitter to celebrate the reopening and congratulate students and faculty. 


Remarkably, the Garissa school reopening isn’t the first time Kenyans have scored a symbolic victory over extremism in recent weeks. In December, al Shabaab gunmen boarded a bus with the intent of killing every Christian on board. But when they attempted to separate the Muslim and Christian passengers, the Muslim passengers refused, telling the attackers to “to kill them together or leave them alone.” The gunmen eventually left, though they did kill two people including the driver. 

In a part of the world where religious ideology is an all-too-frequent source of conflict, these acts of courage on a campus and in a bus are encouraging signs that, slowly but surely, the world might just be headed toward a more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. 

Fewer than 100 students may currently be enrolled at Garissa University College, but global citizens everywhere can certainly get behind the courage and resilience on display in Kenya by each and every one of them. 

Editorial

Defeat Poverty

After deadly attack, Kenyan university trumps terror with courage

By Hans Glick