History

Early History

Prehistoric findings near Kenya's Lake Turkana show that hominids lived in the area 2.6 million years ago. Khoisan speakers were the first modern people known to inhabit Kenya, followed by Bantu-speaking groups from central Africa. The East African coast was first visited by traders from Arabia and Persia around the first century A.D., and by the 8th century, a string of thriving Omani trading ports such as Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu, and Pate had been established. The KiSwahili language developed; it's a mixture of mostly African and Arabic words, but also other languages as the trade net was flung as far east as India and China. Meanwhile Islam imported from the Arabian Peninsula became the dominant religion along the coast. The Portuguese arrived in the 16th century on their way to India during their eager attempt to be part of the rich trade route around the Indian Ocean. They battled with the Omani sultans for dominance of the coast and built Fort Jesus in Mombasa to defend their garrison. But by 1698, Fort Jesus was retaken, the Portuguese left, and the sultans controlled the coast until the colonialists arrived in the 19th century.

Colonial Carve-Up

By the mid-18th century, the first European missionaries had begun exploring inland from the coast; it was German missionaries who first reached the Taita Hills and reported seeing both Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya. The colonization of Kenya was a result of events happening on the island of Zanzibar. In 1885, German gunboats arrived at Zanzibar to demand that the Sultan of Zanzibar relinquish the administration of East Africa to them in order to put a stop to the slave trade. But in the age of the telegraph, gunboat diplomacy was not necessary, and by 1886 the Sultan had agreed to denounce the slave trade and let the Europeans carve up the region. The Germans got Tanganyika, which became German East Africa, while the British got Kenya, which was administered by the Imperial British East Africa Company. In 1894, the British also proclaimed a protectorate over neighboring Uganda.

White Settlers

During the early years of the new colony, the British encouraged settlers to establish farms in the temperate highlands, which were dubbed the White Highlands. Most of the settlers were British, though there was also a significant number of South Africans, and by World War I, 9,000 whites lived in Kenya. Many Africans lost their land and were forced onto inferior land or into the labor market. The Kikuyu, Kenya's largest tribe, were the main losers, as unlike the nomadic Masai they were traditionally farmers. By 1905, the settlers had started to grow coffee, including Danish-born Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), who famously went on to write Out of Africa, which was made into the movie starring Meryl Streep in 1985 and filmed in Kenya. Kenya's other beverage export, tea, was introduced in 1923. The British brought indentured labor from the Indian colonies to construct the Mombasa-Uganda railway, and by the 1920s there was a sizeable Indian population in Kenya. The building of the railway -- which began in 1898 and was completed in 1906 -- was tough on the laborers who had to work in remote regions occupied by wild animals. One of the most famous stories is that two lions killed and ate 135 Indian and African railway workers in the Tsavo region. Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson hunted them down and killed the lions and went on to write the book The Man-Eaters of Tsavo. The story was more recently dramatized in the 1996 movie The Ghost and the Darkness.

Nationalism

By the end of the 19th century, the railway reached halfway across Kenya, and it was here on a high plateau that Nairobi quickly grew from a railway camp to a city. In 1907, the British colonial administration moved from Mombasa to Nairobi. Also from 1907, the settlers -- and a little later on, the Indians -- were permitted to take seats on Kenya's Legislative Council, but Africans were excluded. In 1921, the British protectorate officially became the British Colony of Kenya and was controlled by a British governor until independence in1963. As a reaction to their exclusion from political representation and because of their grievance about losing their land, the Kikuyu people established nationalist organizations in the 1920s, including the East African Association (EAA). By the end of the 1920s, a young Jomo Kenyatta had become general secretary of the EAA, and went on to campaign for land rights and the African representation in the administration of Kenya throughout the 1930 and '40s. In 1947, he led the Kenyan African Union (KAU), which was formed to lobby for independence.

Mau Mau Rebellion

From 1952 to 1956, the violent Mau Mau Rebellion swept through Kenya's White Highlands. Members of a Kikuyu political group, the Mau Mau (which loosely translates as "to terrorize or threaten") sabotaged farms and attacked and killed white farmers and African workers loyal to their white employers. The rebellion actually claimed around 12,000 African lives, though only about 100 settlers were killed. The British declared a state of emergency and jailed Kenyatta, who they mistakenly assumed was the leader of the rebellion. The violence was suppressed in 1956 when 50,000 British soldiers burnt down villages, bombed the region from the air, and imprisoned thousands in detention camps. As violent and destructive as the rebellion was, it did pave the way to political reform.

Independence

Kenyatta wrote letters from prison to gain international support for the freedom movement, and he was moved from prison to house arrest, from which he was released in 1961. The British started to back down and allowed political parties so Africans could take part in the government. Kenyatta became the leader of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), which won the majority of seats in the 1963 elections. Kenya had won its independence and year later and under a new constitution, Kenya became a republic with Kenyatta as president. Despite fears from the white community and non-Kikuyu people, Kenyatta governed fairly and even-handedly among the African, Indian, and white communities, and he was popularly reelected in 1974. Economically, he developed a free market that encouraged foreign investment and supported tourism, particularly by banning hunting in Kenya in 1977 to protect the country's depleting wildlife stocks. Upon his death in 1978, Kenya was regarded by the international community as one of Africa's most stable and prosperous post-independence countries, and Kenyatta was highly respected by both Kenyans and politicians abroad.

The Moi Era

While popular former president Jomo Kenyatta made great strides in developing post-independence Kenya, the same could not be said for his successor. Daniel arap Moi became president in elections at the end of 1978. By 1982 he had amended the constitution to ban political parties and make Kenya a one-party state; his political tactics became increasingly aggressive and autocratic. He attempted to quell any political resistance by increasing the use of guns in the police force and army against demonstrations, sending political critics to prison on dubious charges, and closing down universities (the latter being traditional nurturing places for political idealism). He was not without resistance though, and in 1982 the Kenyan Air Force staged a coup against the government. It failed, leading to numerous deaths and imprisonments; the Air Force was disbanded and replaced with a completely new unit. In 1987, Moi was reelected but the newly introduced voting system was heavily criticized and some of the opposition candidates were jailed for no good reason.

Throughout its term, the Moi government was accused of corruption at the highest levels, and in 1990 Kenyan Foreign Minister Robert Ouko, who had threatened to reveal the names of corrupt ministers, was mysteriously assassinated. This incident sparked the withdrawal of international aid; Moi had to relent to pressure from the aid donors, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and in 1991 he legalized opposition parties so they could take part in the 1992 elections. Nevertheless KAMU and Moi won these elections due to the fragmented nature of the new opposition parties, and again, a criticized electoral process, and he began a fourth term in office. The constitution was changed again in 1996 to allow Moi to run for a fifth term and he again won the 1997 elections, but often violent demonstrations for an effective democracy began in earnest. At this time, it was noted by many that Moi had become one of the richest men in Africa thanks to the rich pickings of government corruption.

Unrelated to Kenya's politics, in August 1998, 230 people perished (mostly Kenyans) when a bomb exploded at Nairobi's U.S. Embassy. The attack was later linked to Al-Qaeda.

Today's Politics

Despite previous constitutional amendments, Moi was not allowed to run for the 2002 presidential elections. Former vice-president Mwai Kibaki was elected president and the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) defeated KAMU by a large majority. One of Kibaki's first promises was to fight corruption; although there have been several investigations by the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (KACC), to date no high-profile individuals have been prosecuted. However, there has been a successful grassroots campaign to stop corruption on a day-to-day level, including posters with telephone numbers on them to report police and other authorities' bribery. Kibaki's other successes include providing free education to primary school-age children, a move that has resulted in 1.7 million additional children going to school in Kenya. There has been considerable growth in the economy since 2003, and, perhaps a little bizarrely by Western standards, the new government has instigated a clampdown on public transport, which in the past was perilously overcrowded and under-managed and had routinely claimed thousands of lives each year. On the downside, in recent years Kenya has suffered from lengthy droughts and has had to import food aid. The north of the country has been under pressure from the thousands of refugees from Somalia and Sudan who have placed a heavy burden on the government.