Who ruled Nairobi?

Nairobi stands on the highlands of southern Kenya, about 1,700 metres above sea level, on the edge of the open plains where Maasai herders grazed their cattle and close to the forested ridges farmed by the Kikuyu. Unlike most African capitals it has no pre-colonial town behind it. It was born in 1899 as a depot on a British railway, and its history is short, fast and shaped by the colonial division of land and people, by the struggle for independence and by its later role as a hub for East Africa and the international organisations based there.

The name comes from a Maasai phrase usually translated as "cool waters", after a stream that crossed the swampy plain. The surrounding country had long been home to Bantu-speaking farmers, among them the Kikuyu and Kamba, part of the much older Bantu expansion across the continent, and to the pastoral Maasai. In the Scramble for Africa Britain declared a protectorate over the region in 1895 and began building the Uganda Railway from Mombasa on the coast towards Lake Victoria, largely with labourers brought from British India. In May 1899 the line reached a flat, well-watered spot just before the steep climb up the escarpment, and the engineers made it their main depot and workshops.

The tented camp grew rapidly into a town of tin-roofed shops, offices and bungalows. In the first decade of the twentieth century it took over from Mombasa as the seat of government of the East Africa Protectorate, which became the colony of Kenya in 1920 within the British Empire. The town was planned on racial lines: Europeans took the airy hills to the west and north, Indian merchants the bazaar near the centre, while Africans, needed as workers but not welcomed as residents, were confined to crowded "locations" to the east. White settlers took over large areas of the fertile highlands, and the Maasai were pushed off land to the south. In 1922 police fired on a crowd protesting the arrest of the activist Harry Thuku, killing a number of people, an early landmark of African political protest in the city.

Nairobi was granted city status by royal charter in 1950, but behind its growth lay deep discontent. After the Second World War African frustration over land, wages and political exclusion grew into the Mau Mau rebellion, and the colonial government declared a state of emergency in 1952. In April 1954 the security forces sealed off Nairobi in Operation Anvil, screened its African population and sent tens of thousands of Kikuyu men to detention camps. Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963, with Nairobi as capital and Jomo Kenyatta as its first leader, as part of the wider decolonisation of Africa.

After independence the city grew quickly as Kenyans moved in from the countryside, and large informal settlements such as Kibera spread alongside new office towers. The UN Environment Programme, founded in 1972, made its headquarters there, and Nairobi became a base for regional business, diplomacy and aid agencies. It has also suffered violence, including the bombing of the US embassy in August 1998, which killed over 200 people, and the attack on the Westgate shopping centre in 2013. With about 4.4 million people counted in the 2019 census, Nairobi is the capital and largest city of Kenya and one of the main economic centres of East Africa.