It was Bonfire Night 2018. On prep-school playing fields across Nairobi, children were oohing and aahing at the fireworks.

But the great and the good of Kenyan society, from the deputy president down, were attending a more rarefied celebration.

At the BBC’s swanky new building on Riverside Drive, one of the Kenyan capital’s smartest thoroughfares, and later at a nearby hotel, they had gathered to witness what should have been a significant moment in the history of British soft power.

The opening of the largest BBC bureau outside the United Kingdom, the centrepiece of a £289 million global expansion funded by the British Government, could not have been more timely.

State-backed disinformation and propaganda, much of it emanating from Russia and China, was spreading across the continent, sowing division, promoting military rule and planting suspicion in Western policy and philanthropy.

Now Britain was fighting back, across the world, but particularly in Africa.

With 300 employees in its new Nairobi bureau and 300 others in expanded operations across the continent, the calm, reassuring tones of the BBC World Service – unprejudiced, unvarnished and free from bias – would reach more people in more languages than ever before.

It was, the BBC said, the biggest expansion of the World Service since the Second World War.