The history of Kenya

Kenya, on the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa, holds some of the oldest evidence of human ancestors anywhere on earth. Over thousands of years Cushitic-speaking herders, Nilotic pastoralists and Bantu-speaking farmers settled its highlands, lake shores and plains, while on the coast African towns trading across the Indian Ocean grew into the Muslim city-states of the Swahili world. Portuguese and then Omani rulers held the coast from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and in 1895 Britain made the interior a protectorate and opened its best land to white settlers. Land hunger led to the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, which Britain crushed with mass detention and torture, but independence followed in 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta. Since then Kenya has moved from one-party rule to a contested but lively multiparty democracy.

Fossils from the Tugen Hills include Orrorin tugenensis, about six million years old and one of the earliest known members of the human line. Around Lake Turkana, palaeontologists from the Leakey family and others have found Australopithecus anamensis, more than four million years old, and the almost complete skeleton of a Homo erectus boy who lived about 1.6 million years ago. Stone tools from Lomekwi, west of the lake, are more than three million years old, older than the genus Homo itself, and the oldest Acheulean hand axes in the world, about 1.76 million years old, also come from West Turkana. The cave of Panga ya Saidi near the coast holds the grave of a child buried about 78,000 years ago, the oldest known human burial in Africa.

The first known inhabitants of later times were hunter-gatherers, whose rock paintings survive at sites such as Mfangano Island in Lake Victoria. From around 3000 BCE herders speaking Southern Cushitic languages moved into the north with cattle, sheep and goats; at Lothagam North, near Lake Turkana, they built a monumental cemetery holding hundreds of burials. Pastoralism spread into the central Rift Valley by about 1000 BCE, and Southern Nilotic speakers, ancestors of today's Kalenjin, arrived in the western highlands from around 700 BCE.

The Bantu expansion brought farmers and ironworkers to the Lake Victoria basin early in the first millennium BCE. The Urewe culture of Nyanza was one of Africa's oldest iron-working traditions, and Bantu communities had reached the Kenyan coast by the first centuries CE. Later migrations shaped the modern map: the Luo moved south from the Nile valley through Uganda into western Kenya from about the fifteenth century, and Maa-speaking pastoralists, the Maasai, spread across the Rift Valley grasslands. In the west the Wanga people of the Luhya founded a kingdom in the late seventeenth century, ruled by a monarch called the Nabongo from Mumias, the most centralised state in pre-colonial Kenya. Most other societies, including the Kikuyu, Kamba, Luo and Maasai, were governed through lineages, councils of elders and age-sets rather than kings.

The coast was linked to a much wider world. A Greek merchant's guide of the first century CE, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, describes trade with the coast its author called Azania, and Arabic writers later named it the land of the Zanj. Between about 300 and 1000 CE, farming and fishing communities descended from Bantu migrants built trading settlements whose people exported ivory, gold from further south, mangrove poles, tortoiseshell and slaves, in return for cloth, glass beads and ceramics from Arabia, Persia, India and China. At Shanga in the Lamu archipelago, archaeologists have found mosques dating back to the eighth century, among the earliest in sub-Saharan Africa.

From these roots grew the Muslim, stone-built towns of Swahili culture, including Lamu, Pate, Malindi, Gedi and Mombasa, which shared a Bantu language enriched by Arabic, the faith of Islam and a merchant aristocracy. Archaeology has shown them to be African towns that absorbed immigrants and influences through trade, not colonies founded by Arabs or Persians as was once believed. They were rivals as often as partners, together with Mogadishu to the north and Kilwa and Zanzibar to the south. The traveller Ibn Battuta visited Mombasa in 1331 and praised its wooden mosques and devout people. The fleets of Zheng He, admiral of the Ming dynasty, visited the coast in the early fifteenth century.

In April 1498 Vasco da Gama was received with hostility at Mombasa but welcomed at Malindi, whose ruler gave him a pilot to guide him across the ocean to India. The Portuguese Empire aimed not at settlement but at control of the ocean trade: a fleet under Francisco de Almeida sacked Mombasa in 1505, and Malindi became Portugal's ally. To hold the coast the Portuguese built Fort Jesus at Mombasa from 1593. Their tolls and violence won them few friends, and the coastal towns turned for help to the Omani Arabs, who had driven the Portuguese from Muscat in 1650. After a siege of almost three years, Omani forces took Fort Jesus in 1698, and by 1730 Portuguese power north of Mozambique was over.

Omani authority was often loose. In Mombasa the Mazrui family ruled almost independently until Sultan Seyyid Said of Oman, who moved his capital to Zanzibar around 1840, brought the city under his control in 1837. The nineteenth century saw clove and grain plantations on the coast worked by enslaved Africans, and caravans pushing inland to Mount Kenya and Lake Victoria for ivory and captives. By the 1870s and 1880s enslaved people made up a large share of the coastal population. Christian missions followed from the 1840s, and in 1874 Britain began settling people freed from slave ships at Freretown near Mombasa.

In the Scramble for Africa, Britain and the German Empire divided the sultan's mainland. In 1888 the Imperial British East Africa Company received a charter for the Kenyan coast and interior, while Germany took what became Tanganyika, now Tanzania. The company soon went bankrupt, and on 1 July 1895 the British government declared the East Africa Protectorate, a new territory of the British Empire. The coastal strip remained nominally the sultan's.

The Uganda Railway, begun at Mombasa in 1895 and reaching Lake Victoria in 1901, was built largely by labourers brought from British India, some of whom stayed to found Kenya's South Asian community. Nairobi began in 1899 as a railway depot and soon became the capital. Conquest was violent. The Nandi resisted for a decade under their leader Koitalel arap Samoei, who was shot dead by a British officer at a meeting in 1905; the Kikuyu leader Waiyaki wa Hinga died in British custody in 1892; and punitive expeditions burned villages and seized livestock across the highlands. The Maasai were moved from their northern grazing lands by agreements of 1904 and 1911 to make way for settlers.

To make the railway pay, officials encouraged European, largely British and South African, settlement in the cool and fertile highlands. The White Highlands, eventually some seven million acres, were reserved for whites, and Africans were confined to reserves, taxed through hut and poll taxes, and pushed into labour on settler farms. Africans were barred from growing coffee, the most profitable crop. In World War I the colony was the base for the long campaign against German East Africa, and the British conscripted hundreds of thousands of Africans into the Carrier Corps, tens of thousands of whom died of disease and exhaustion. In 1920 the territory became Kenya Colony. From 1920 men had to carry an identity pass, the kipande, which settlers used to control labour.

The first modern African political movements arose against these policies. In 1921 Harry Thuku founded the Young Kikuyu Association and then the multi-ethnic East African Association to oppose wage cuts, the kipande and land loss; his arrest in March 1922 led to a protest in Nairobi in which police killed a number of demonstrators. The Kikuyu Central Association, founded in 1924, campaigned for the return of alienated land, and its general secretary, Jomo Kenyatta, went to London in 1929 to present its case. He stayed in Europe for most of the next fifteen years, studied anthropology, published Facing Mount Kenya in 1938, and joined Kwame Nkrumah and others at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester in 1945.

The Devonshire Declaration of 1923 announced that African interests in Kenya were paramount, but settlers kept their dominance in the Legislative Council. In World War II about 98,000 Kenyans served in the King's African Rifles in the campaigns against Italy in Somaliland and Ethiopia and in Burma. Veterans came home to a colony that still offered them no political voice, while population growth, the eviction of Kikuyu squatters from settler farms and overcrowded reserves made land the central grievance.

Kenyatta returned in 1946 and became president of the Kenya African Union, which sought reform through constitutional means. Alongside it a more radical movement grew among the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru, bound by secret oaths and calling itself the Land and Freedom Army; the British called it Mau Mau. After a wave of killings, including that of a senior loyalist chief, Governor Evelyn Baring declared a State of Emergency on 20 October 1952. Kenyatta and five other leaders were arrested and, after a trial with doubtful evidence, he was sentenced in 1953 to seven years' hard labour.

Thousands of fighters took to the forests of the Aberdares and Mount Kenya under commanders such as Dedan Kimathi. The war was also a civil war among the Kikuyu, and Mau Mau killed far more Africans than Europeans: officially some 1,800 African civilians, and by some estimates many more, against 32 European settlers. In the worst attack, at Lari in March 1953, insurgents burned and hacked to death about 74 people, mostly the families of loyalists, and security forces killed many more in reprisals.

The British response was on a vast scale. British troops, the King's African Rifles and the Kikuyu Home Guard killed about 12,000 alleged fighters by official count, and possibly more than 20,000, and the Royal Air Force bombed the forests. In Operation Anvil in April 1954 Nairobi was sealed off and tens of thousands of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru were rounded up. Officially about 80,000 people were held without trial in a network of detention camps known as the Pipeline, and some historians put the number who passed through them much higher. Detainees were screened and forced to confess their oaths; beatings, torture, sexual violence and forced labour were systematic, and disease and hunger killed many. More than a million rural Kikuyu were forced into fortified villages behind barbed wire and trenches. Colonial courts hanged 1,090 people, more than in any other conflict of Britain's empire. Kimathi was captured in October 1956 and hanged in 1957, effectively ending the military campaign.

The violence became impossible to hide when, on 3 March 1959, guards at Hola camp clubbed 11 detainees to death. The killings caused uproar in Britain and hastened the end of the Emergency in January 1960. Decades later, in 2013, the British government expressed regret for the torture and ill-treatment of Kenyans and paid £19.9 million to 5,228 surviving victims, while still denying legal liability.

The war convinced Britain that settler rule could not last. A conference at Lancaster House in London in 1960 accepted African majority rule. Two parties formed: the Kenya African National Union (KANU), led by James Gichuru, Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga, and the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), which drew on smaller communities fearing domination. Kenyatta was released in August 1961 and took over KANU, which won the elections of May 1963. Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963 with Kenyatta as prime minister, and a republic a year later with him as president, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa. Elizabeth II, who had learned of her accession in 1952 while staying in Kenya, was briefly its head of state.

Kenyatta, called Mzee, preached reconciliation under the slogan Harambee, "let us pull together", kept close ties with the West during the Cold War, and presided over strong growth based on tea, coffee and tourism. The British government funded the purchase of settler farms for African smallholders, but much of the best land went to well-connected people, many of them Kikuyu, and land disputes festered. In the north-east, ethnic Somalis seeking union with Somalia fought the Shifta War from 1963 to 1967. KADU merged into KANU in 1964, and when Oginga Odinga left to form the leftist Kenya People's Union, it was harassed and in 1969 banned. That year Tom Mboya was assassinated in Nairobi, and police killed demonstrators in Kisumu during a visit by Kenyatta.

Kenyatta died in August 1978 and was succeeded by his vice-president, Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin. In 1982 Moi made Kenya a one-party state in law, and an attempted coup by air force officers that August was crushed with many deaths. His rule became increasingly authoritarian: dissidents were detained and tortured in the Nyayo House cells in Nairobi, and in 1984 security forces killed hundreds and perhaps thousands of Somali men at Wagalla airstrip in the north-east.

Protests such as the Saba Saba rally of 7 July 1990, and pressure from foreign donors after the Cold War, forced Moi to accept multiparty politics in December 1991. He won the elections of 1992 and 1997 against a divided opposition, amid ethnic clashes in the Rift Valley in which, investigations later found, politicians had incited attacks on Kikuyu and other communities. In August 1998 al-Qaeda bombed the United States embassy in Nairobi, killing more than 200 people.

Barred from running again, Moi backed Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the first president, in 2002, but an opposition coalition swept to victory and Mwai Kibaki became president in Kenya's first peaceful transfer of power to the opposition. Kibaki's disputed re-election over Raila Odinga in December 2007 set off violence along ethnic and political lines in which more than a thousand people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced. A deal mediated by Kofi Annan in February 2008 made Odinga prime minister in a coalition government.

A new constitution approved in 2010 created a bill of rights, devolved power to 47 counties and strengthened the courts. Uhuru Kenyatta won the presidency in 2013 with William Ruto as his deputy, while both faced charges at the International Criminal Court over the 2007 to 2008 violence, which were later dropped. The Somali militant group al-Shabab, targeted by Kenyan troops in Somalia from 2011, attacked the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi in 2013 and Garissa University College in 2015, killing 148 people there. In 2017 the Supreme Court annulled Kenyatta's re-election, one of the first such rulings in the world; Odinga boycotted the rerun, and Kenyatta won it.

Ruto narrowly defeated Odinga in August 2022 with 50.5 per cent of the vote, and the Supreme Court upheld the result. Heavy debt led his government to propose new taxes, and in June 2024 youth-led protests against a finance bill spread across the country. On 25 June protesters stormed Parliament in Nairobi and police opened fire; Ruto withdrew the bill and dismissed most of his cabinet, but dozens of people were killed in the protests and rights groups accused the police of abductions and killings. Protests marking the anniversary in June 2025 were again met with deadly force. Odinga, who had lost a bid to chair the African Union Commission in February 2025, died in India on 15 October 2025 at the age of 80, and his funeral drew vast crowds.