Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. As of mid-2024, its estimated population is more than 52.4 million, making it the 27th-most-populous country in the world and the 7th most populous in Africa. Kenya's geography, climate, and population vary widely.
Location of Kenya in East Africa
Key Cities and Geography
Kenya's capital and largest city is Nairobi. The second-largest and oldest city is Mombasa, a major port city located on Mombasa Island. Other major cities within the country include Kisumu, Nakuru, and Eldoret. In western rift valley counties, the landscape includes cold, snow-capped mountaintops (such as Batian, Nelion, and Point Lenana on Mount Kenya) with vast surrounding forests, wildlife, and fertile agricultural regions in temperate climates.
Early History and Colonization
Kenya's earliest inhabitants included some of the first humans to evolve from ancestral members of the genus Homo. Ample fossil evidence for this evolutionary history has been found at Koobi Fora. Later, Kenya was inhabited by hunter-gatherers similar to the present-day Hadza people. According to archaeological dating of associated artifacts and skeletal material, Cushitic speakers first settled in the region's lowlands between 3,200 and 1,300 BC, a phase known as the Lowland Savanna Pastoral Neolithic. European contact began in 1500 AD with the Portuguese Empire, and effective colonisation of Kenya began in the 19th century during the European exploration of Africa.
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Modern-day Kenya emerged from a protectorate, established by the British Empire in 1895, and the subsequent Kenya Colony, which began in 1920. Mombasa was the capital of the British East Africa Protectorate, which included most of what is now Kenya and southwestern Somalia, from 1889 to 1907. Numerous disputes between the UK and the colony led to the Mau Mau revolution, which began in 1952, and the declaration of Kenya's independence in 1963. After independence, Kenya remained a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.
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Political Structure and International Relations
Kenya is a presidential representative democratic republic, in which elected officials represent the people and the president is the head of state and government. The country is a member of the United Nations, the Commonwealth, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, COMESA, International Criminal Court, as well as several other international organisations.
Economic Overview
Kenya's economy is the largest in East and Central Africa, with Nairobi serving as a major regional commercial hub. With a per-capita Gross National Income of $2,110, the country is a lower-middle-income economy. Agriculture is the country's largest economic sector; tea and coffee are the sector's traditional cash crops, while fresh flowers are a fast-growing export. The service industry, particularly tourism, is also one of the country's major economic drivers.
President of Kenya
Origin of the Name "Kenya"
The Republic of Kenya is named after Mount Kenya. The earliest recorded version of the modern name was written by German explorer Johann Ludwig Krapf in the 19th century. While travelling with a Kamba caravan led by the long-distance trader Chief Kivoi, Krapf spotted the mountain peak and asked what it was called. Kivoi told him "Kĩ-Nyaa" or "Kĩlĩma- Kĩinyaa", probably because the pattern of black rock and white snow on its peaks reminded him of the feathers of the male ostrich. In archaic Kikuyu, the word 'nyaga' or more commonly 'manyaganyaga' is used to describe an extremely bright object. The Agikuyu, who inhabit the slopes of Mt. Kenya, call it Kĩrĩma Kĩrĩnyaga (literally 'the mountain with brightness') in Kikuyu, while the Embu call it "Ki-nyaga". Ludwig Krapf recorded the name as both Kenia and Kegnia. Some have said that this was a precise notation of the African pronunciation . An 1882 map drawn by Joseph Thompsons, a Scottish geologist and naturalist, indicated Mt. Kenya as Mt. Kenia. The mountain's name was accepted, pars pro toto, as the name of the country.
Prehistoric Inhabitants
Hominid species, such as Homo habilis (fl. 1.8 to 2.5 million years ago) and Homo erectus (fl. 1.9 million to 350,000 years ago), possibly the direct ancestors of modern Homo sapiens, had lived in Kenya in the Pleistocene epoch. East Africa, including Kenya, is one of the earliest regions where modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have lived. In 1984, during excavations at Lake Turkana palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey, assisted by Kamoya Kimeu, had discovered the Turkana Boy, a 1.6-million-year-old Homo erectus fossil. Further evidence of Kenya's prehistory was found in 2018, namely the early emergence of modern behaviours, including long-distance trade networks (involving goods such as obsidian), the use of pigments, and possibly the making of projectile points, about 320,000 years ago.
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Early Populations and Climate
The first inhabitants of present-day Kenya were hunter-gatherer groups, akin to the modern Khoisan speakers. These people were later largely replaced by agropastoralist Cushitic (ancestral to Kenya's Cushitic speakers), who originated from the Horn of Africa. During the early Holocene, the region's climate shifted from drier to wetter conditions.
Coastal History and Trade
The coastline of Kenya was home to communities of ironworkers and Bantu subsistence farmers, hunters, and fishers who supported the region's economy with agriculture, fishing, metal production, and trade with foreign countries. By the 1st century CE, many of the area's city-states, such as Mombasa, Malindi, and Zanzibar, began to establish trading relations with the Arabs. The Kilwa Sultanate was a medieval sultanate centred at Kilwa, in modern-day Tanzania. Portuguese presence in Kenya lasted from 1498 until 1730. One major city on the Kenyan coast is Malindi. It has been an important Swahili settlement since the 14th century, and the city once rivalled Mombasa for dominance in the African Great Lakes region. Malindi has traditionally been a friendly port city for foreign powers.
18th and 19th Century Movements
During the 18th and 19th century, the Masai people moved into the central and southern Rift Valley plains of Kenya, from a region north of Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana). Although there weren't many of them, they managed to conquer a great amount of land in the plains, where people did not put up much resistance. The Nandi peoples managed to oppose the Masai, while the Taveta peoples fled to the forests on the eastern edge of Mount Kilimanjaro, although they later were forced to leave the land due to the threat of smallpox. An outbreak of either rinderpest or pleuropneumonia greatly affected the Masai's cattle, while an epidemic of smallpox affected the Masai themselves. After the death of the Masai Mbatian, the chief laibon (medicine man), the Masai split into warring factions.
Colonial Period
The first foreigners to successfully get past the Masai were Johann Ludwig Krapf and Johannes Rebmann, two German missionaries who established a mission in Rabai, not too far from Mombasa. The German Empire established a protectorate over the Sultan of Zanzibar's coastal possessions in 1885, followed by the arrival of the Imperial British East Africa Company in 1888. The building of the railway was resisted by some ethnic groups-notably the Nandi, led by Orkoiyot Koitalel Arap Samoei from 1890 to 1900-but the British eventually built it.
World War I
At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the governors of British East Africa (as the protectorate was generally known) and German East Africa initially agreed on a truce in an attempt to keep the young colonies out of direct hostilities. But Lieutenant Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German military commander, determined to tie down as many British resources as possible. Completely cut off from Germany, Lettow-Vorbeck conducted an effective guerrilla warfare campaign, living off the land, capturing British supplies, and remaining undefeated. To chase von Lettow, the British deployed the British Indian Army troops from India but needed large numbers of porters to overcome the formidable logistics of transporting supplies far into the interior on foot.
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20th Century and European Settlement
During the early part of the 20th century, the interior central highlands were settled by British and other European farmers, who became wealthy farming coffee and tea. One depiction of this period of change from a colonist's perspective is found in the memoir Out of Africa by Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke, published in 1937. The central highlands were already home to over a million members of the Kikuyu people, most of whom had no land claims in European terms and lived as itinerant farmers. To protect their interests, the settlers banned the growing of coffee and introduced a hut tax, and the landless were granted less and less land in exchange for their labour.
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World War II and the Mau Mau Rebellion
Throughout World War II, Kenya was an important source of manpower and agriculture for the United Kingdom. Kenya itself was the site of fighting between Allied forces and Italian troops in 1940-41, when Italian forces invaded. From October 1952 to December 1959, Kenya was in a state of emergency arising from the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule. The Mau Mau, also known as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, were primarily Kikuyu, Embu and Meru people. During the colonial administration's crackdown, over 11,000 freedom fighters had been killed, along with 100 British troops and 2,000 Kenyan loyalist soldiers. War crimes were committed on both sides of the conflict, including the publicised Lari massacre and the Hola massacre. The governor requested and obtained British and African troops, including the King's African Rifles. The British began counter-insurgency operations. The capture of Waruhiu Itote (nom de guerre "General China") on 15 January 1954 and the subsequent interrogation led to a better understanding of the Mau Mau command structure for the British. Operation Anvil opened on 24 April 1954, after weeks of planning by the army with the approval of the War Council. The operation effectively placed Nairobi under military siege. Nairobi's occupants were screened and suspected Mau Mau supporters moved to detention camps. The capture of Dedan Kimathi on 21 October 1956 in Nyeri signified the ultimate defeat of the Mau Mau and essentially ended the military offensive.
Land Tenure and Independence
During this period, substantial governmental changes to land tenure occurred. The most important of these was the Swynnerton Plan, which was used to both reward loyalists and punish Mau Mau. Before Kenya got its independence, Somali ethnic people in present-day Kenya in the areas of Northern Frontier Districts petitioned Her Majesty's Government not to be included in Kenya. Despite British hopes of handing power to "moderate" local rivals, it was the Kenya African National Union (KANU) of Jomo Kenyatta that formed a government. The Colony of Kenya and the Protectorate of Kenya each came to an end on 12 December 1963, with independence conferred on all of Kenya. The U.K. ceded sovereignty over the Colony of Kenya. The Sultan of Zanzibar agreed that simultaneous with independence for the colony, he would cease to have sovereignty over the Protectorate of Kenya so that all of Kenya would become one sovereign state. In this way, Kenya became an independent country under the Kenya Independence Act 1963 of the United Kingdom.
Post-Independence Era
On 12 December 1964, the Republic of Kenya was proclaimed, and Jomo Kenyatta became Kenya's first president. Under Kenyatta, corruption became widespread throughout the government, civil service, and business community. Kenyatta and his family were tied up with this corruption as they enriched themselves through the mass purchase of property after 1963. Their acquisitions in the Central, Rift Valley, and Coast Provinces aroused great anger among landless Kenyans. His family used his presidential position to circumvent legal or administrative obstacles to acquiring property. Kenyatta's mixed legacy was highlighted at the 10-year anniversary of Kenya's independence. A December 1973 article in The New York Times praised Kenyatta's leadership and Kenya for emerging as a model of pragmatism and conservatism. Kenya's GDP had increased at an annual rate of 6.6%, higher than the population growth rate of more than 3%. But Amnesty International responded to the article by stating the cost of the stability in terms of human rights abuses. The opposition party started by Oginga Odinga-Kenya People's Union (KPU)-was banned in 1969 after the Kisumu Massacre and KPU leaders were still in detention without trial in gross violation of the U.N.
Daniel arap Moi's Presidency
After Kenyatta died, Daniel arap Moi became president. He retained the presidency, running unopposed in elections held in 1979, 1983 (snap elections), and 1988, all of which were held under the single-party constitution. The 1982 coup was masterminded by a low-ranking Air Force serviceman, Senior Private Hezekiah Ochuka, and was staged mainly by enlisted men of the Air Force. On the heels of the Garissa Massacre of 1980, Kenyan troops committed the Wagalla massacre in 1984 against thousands of civilians in Wajir County. The election held in 1988 saw the advent of the mlolongo (queuing) system, where voters were supposed to line up behind their favoured candidates instead of casting a secret ballot. This was seen as the climax of a very undemocratic regime and led to widespread agitation for constitutional reform.
Transition to Multiparty System
In 1991, Kenya transitioned to a multiparty political system after 26 years of single-party rule. On 28 October 1992, Moi dissolved parliament, five months before the end of his term. As a result, preparations began for all elective seats in parliament as well as the president. The election was scheduled to take place on 7 December 1992, but delays led to its postponement to 29 December. Apart from KANU, the ruling party, other parties represented in the elections included FORD Kenya and FORD Asili. This election was marked by large-scale intimidation of opponents and harassment of election officials. It resulted in an economic crisis propagated by ethnic violence as the president was accused of rigging electoral results to retain power. This election was a turning point for Kenya as it signified the beginning of the end of Moi's leadership and the rule of KANU. Moi retained the presidency and George Saitoti became vice president. The 1992 elections marked the beginning of multiparty politics after more than 25 years of KANU rule.
Post-Election Violence and Alliances
Following skirmishes in the aftermath of the elections, 5,000 people were killed and another 75,000 displaced from their homes. In the next five years, many political alliances were formed in preparation for the next elections. In 1994, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga died and several coalitions joined his FORD Kenya party to form a new party.
| Fact | Description |
|---|---|
| Official Name | Republic of Kenya |
| Location | East Africa |
| Capital City | Nairobi |
| Largest City | Nairobi |
| Official Languages | Swahili, English |
| Population (2024 est.) | 52.4 million |
| Currency | Kenyan Shilling (KES) |
| Major Industries | Agriculture, Tourism, Services |
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