A Brief History of Kenya

Prehistory and early settlement

• 3.3 million years ago: Kenya has one of the longest records of human activity anywhere on Earth. At Lomekwi, near Lake Turkana, archaeologists have found the oldest stone tools yet known. These tools are about 3.3 million years old, and their makers are working with stone long before our own genus, Homo, appears. Toolmakers in the Koobi Fora area later leave behind Oldowan tools dating to around 2.6 million years ago. By roughly 1.2 million years ago, hominins at Olorgesailie in southern Kenya shape the teardrop handaxes of the Acheulean.
• Around 320,000 years ago: At Olorgesailie in southern Kenya, early humans make a decisive technological leap. They switch from bulky handaxes to smaller, more refined Middle Stone Age tools. They also grind red and black pigments and carry obsidian from sources up to 55 miles (90 km) away. These are among the earliest long-distance exchange networks known anywhere.
• Around 3000 BCE: Cushitic-speaking herders move south from the Horn of Africa into northern Kenya. They are the first in the region to keep domesticated cattle, along with sheep and goats. Their descendants, later grouped as the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic, spread through the Rift Valley over the following millennia and bury their dead under stone cairns, many of which still stand today.
• From around 1000 BCE: Bantu-speaking farmers begin reaching Kenya from the Nigeria and Cameroon borderlands of West and Central Africa. Over the first millennium BCE they migrate east through the Great Lakes region into western Kenya. They grow crops such as millet and yams and, in time, work iron. Their languages are the ancestors of many spoken across Kenya today.
• First millennium CE: Many different communities settle across Kenya's interior. Bantu-speaking farmers such as the Kikuyu, Kamba, Luhya, and Meru take root in the highlands and lake country, while Nilotic-speaking groups such as the Luo, Kalenjin, Maasai, and Turkana bring herding, and the Maasai build a cattle-based life across the Rift Valley. Long before any European arrives, these societies govern themselves and run their own economies and trade routes.

The Swahili coast and Indian Ocean trade

• 1st century CE: East Africa's coast is already part of the Indian Ocean trade. In a Greek merchant's handbook, the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a sailor describes ships trading along these shores with Arabia and beyond.
• 8th to 15th centuries: African communities along the coast build a string of prosperous city-states, among them Mombasa, Malindi, Pate, and Lamu. Their inhabitants speak Swahili, a Bantu language, and grow wealthy on trade in gold, ivory, timber, and enslaved people whom they move between the interior and the wider Indian Ocean world. Around 1000 CE, coastal African families and incoming Persian, and later Arab and Indian, merchants intermarry, and most townspeople adopt Islam. Swahili civilisation is African at its roots. The coral-stone towns and the Swahili poetry are homegrown achievements, and the coast itself is one of the most cosmopolitan corners of the medieval world.
• Traders on the coast, among them Arab and Omani merchants, take part in an Indian Ocean trade in enslaved East Africans. Captives are marched to the coast and shipped to Arabia, Persia, India, and the islands of the Indian Ocean to work as labourers, soldiers, household servants, and concubines. Traders keep it going for centuries, and by the 1800s the trade is far larger than before.
• 1498: Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama reaches the East African coast. He is the first European to do so. Over the next century the Portuguese fight for control of the ports, and in 1593 they begin building Fort Jesus at Mombasa to guard the harbour. The fort is still there today. It is now a museum and one of Mombasa's landmarks.
• 1698: After a siege of nearly three years, Omani forces take Fort Jesus and drive the Portuguese from Mombasa. The Omanis go on to dominate the coast and its trade, and in the 1800s, they make Zanzibar the seat of their East African empire.
• 19th century: Sultan Said bin Sultan, known as Seyyid Said, moves his court to Zanzibar and covers the islands in clove plantations. The planters rely on enslaved labour from the mainland, and slavers raid deeper into the interior than ever before.

British colonisation

• Late 19th century: British explorers push into the interior in search of the source of the Nile and of resources to exploit. On the coast, the British sign treaties with local leaders and use those deals to seize control of trade and administration.
• 1888: The Imperial British East Africa Company is set up to run British interests in the region, and Queen Victoria grants it a royal charter the same year. The company is soon bankrupt, and in 1895, the British government takes over its territory as the East Africa Protectorate.
• 1890 to 1905: The Nandi, under their spiritual leader Koitalel arap Samoei, fight British land seizures and the new railway for more than a decade. In 1905, a British officer lures Koitalel to a meeting and shoots him dead, and the organised Nandi resistance is broken soon after.
• 1895: The British government now rules the territory directly as the East Africa Protectorate. Railway engineers found Nairobi in 1899 as a depot on the line to Lake Victoria, and the British move the colonial capital there from Mombasa in 1905.
  • The British reshape Kenya's economy for their own benefit. They push African farmers off the most fertile land, especially the central highlands, which settlers call the White Highlands, and hand it to European planters who grow coffee and tea for export.
  • To force Africans into wage work, the administration imposes heavy taxes and drafts labourers onto settler farms and public works. Subsistence farmers and herders lose both their land and their independence in the process.
• 1901: By 1901 the builders have carried the Uganda Railway from Mombasa all the way to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, five years after work begins at the coast. The British ship in tens of thousands of indentured labourers from British India to build the line, and around 2,500 of them die doing it. Many who survive settle in Kenya, and their descendants will become a large part of the country's South Asian community. Once the railway is in place, European settlers can move into the interior in large numbers, and the colony is tightly bound to the imperial economy.
• 1907: Britain abolishes the legal status of slavery on the Kenyan mainland, 10 years after forcing the same on Zanzibar in 1897. The Royal Navy has spent years intercepting slave ships in the Indian Ocean, and London has pressed the sultans of Zanzibar into a series of anti-slavery treaties. Freedom on paper is slow to change their lives, and many freed men and women are bound to their former owners for years afterwards.
• 1913 to 1914: Communities across Kenya resist British rule, and one of the sharpest revolts is on the coast. Among the Giriama, a woman named Mekatilili wa Menza rallies her people against British land seizures, forced labour, new taxes, and the drafting of young men as porters.
• 1914 to 1918: When the First World War breaks out, Britain conscripts hundreds of thousands of Kenyan men as porters, the Carrier Corps, to haul supplies for its campaign against German East Africa. Huge numbers die of disease, hunger, exhaustion, and neglect. The commonly cited figure is about 45,000 Kenyans dead, and many historians put it far higher. The toll is heaviest among the Kikuyu and Luo communities. Nairobi's Kariokor district is named after the Carrier Corps.
• 1920: Britain turns the protectorate into a full colony, Kenya Colony, run straight from London, and Sir Edward Northey serves as its first governor.
  • Colonial Kenya is built on racial hierarchy. White settlers hold the best land and nearly all political power, while the African majority is shut out of both and made to carry a pass, the kipande, that the authorities use to control where Africans can work and live.
  • Africans organise against this early. In 1921 Harry Thuku founds the Young Kikuyu Association, one of the first movements to challenge colonial rule, and the following year Britain arrests and exiles him.
• 1940s and 1950s: Africans press harder for land and self-rule. Jomo Kenyatta leads the constitutional campaign through the Kenya African Union, while Mau Mau fighters take up arms in 1952. Its fighters come mainly from Kikuyu communities, as well as from Embu and Meru. Britain answers with a brutal counter-insurgency. It declares a state of emergency and jails Kenyatta. It locks up well over 100,000 Kenyans in detention camps and fortified villages. The colonial government counts about 11,000 Mau Mau killed, and many historians put the real toll far higher; far more Kenyans than settlers die. Decades later, in 2013, Britain will settle a lawsuit brought by camp survivors. It will pay compensation to more than 5,000 of them and admit that colonial forces tortured detainees.

Independence

• 1963: Kenya becomes independent on 12 December, and Jomo Kenyatta takes office as its first prime minister and, soon after, its president.
• 1964: Kenya becomes a republic, and Kenyatta stays on as president.
  • Land is the great unfinished business of independence. Through the Million-Acre Scheme, the government buys out European farmers and resettles African families on their land. The well-connected, though, often grab the best plots, and many landless families are left out. The land question will be one of the most divisive issues in Kenyan politics for generations.
  • The government also sets out to build a nation from many peoples. It builds national institutions and invests in roads and schools. It also tries to knit rival ethnic groups into one country.
• 1970s and 1980s: Corruption is rampant across these two decades, and many Kenyans grow poorer. In 1975, the popular MP JM Kariuki is murdered, a killing many blame on figures close to power, and one that is never fully solved.
• 1978: Jomo Kenyatta dies in office, and his vice-president, Daniel arap Moi, takes over.
  • Moi rules for 24 years and tolerates little dissent. He makes Kenya a one-party state in law in 1982 and jails and tortures his opponents. That same year, he survives an attempted air force coup.
• 1990s: Moi comes under heavy pressure from Kenyans and from Western donors, and he gives ground. In 1991, the parliament repeals Section 2A of the constitution and makes opposition parties legal again. Moi still wins the 1992 and 1997 elections, because the opposition keeps splitting its vote.

21st-century developments

• 2002: Moi steps down after more than two decades in power, and Mwai Kibaki wins the presidency in Kenya's first peaceful handover of power. Kibaki reopens the economy and brings in free primary schooling. He also promises to clean up corruption, although his own government is soon caught up in major graft scandals.
• 2007 to 2008: A disputed election is followed by the worst violence since independence. More than 1,000 Kenyans are killed, and hundreds of thousands are driven from their homes, and much of the killing is along ethnic lines. Kibaki is declared the winner amid accusations of rigging. The crisis ends only when he and opposition leader Raila Odinga agree to share power, and Odinga becomes prime minister.
• 2010: Kenyans vote in a new constitution by referendum. It is the biggest political reform since independence. Kenya now has 47 county governments that share power with the presidency, and Kenyans have a stronger bill of rights and more independent courts behind them.
• 2013: Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the first president, wins the top job as Kenya's youngest president, even as he faces charges at the International Criminal Court over the 2007 to 2008 violence. The court later drops the case. He pours money into roads, railways, ports, and power plants, and takes on big loans from China. The bill is heavy public debt, and his government also faces corruption cases and anger over inequality.
• The Somali militant group al-Shabaab carries out deadly attacks inside Kenya during these years, among them the Westgate mall siege in Nairobi in 2013 and the Garissa University killings in 2015.
• 2017: Kenyatta wins re-election, but Raila Odinga challenges the result, and the Supreme Court throws it out and orders a fresh vote, the first time any African court has annulled a presidential election. Odinga boycotts the re-run in protest, and Kenyatta wins it easily.
• 2018: Kenyatta and Odinga stun the country by shaking hands in public and calling a truce, the moment Kenyans simply call 'the handshake'. The two men bury their rivalry for the rest of the term, although critics read the deal as elites carving up power among themselves.
• 2022: William Ruto becomes Kenya's fifth president after narrowly beating Raila Odinga. He runs as the champion of ordinary 'hustlers' against the country's political dynasties and promises to bring down the cost of living.
• 2024: Ruto tries to push a tax-raising Finance Bill through parliament, and the backlash is the biggest of his presidency. Young Kenyans who call themselves Gen Z organise online, across ethnic and party lines, and march in dozens of towns. On 25 June they storm parliament in Nairobi, only for dozens of them to be killed by the police. Ruto backs down: he drops the bill and sacks most of his cabinet. He then brings opposition figures into a 'broad-based government', among them allies of Raila Odinga.
• Later in 2024, Ruto falls out with his own deputy, Rigathi Gachagua. In October, the parliament impeaches and removes Gachagua, the first sitting deputy president ever ousted this way, and Kithure Kindiki replaces him.
• 2025: Raila Odinga dies on 15 October, aged 80, after a heart attack while travelling in India. For more than 40 years, he was Kenya's foremost opposition leader and a champion of both multiparty democracy and the 2010 constitution. Kenya is now without one of its central political figures, less than two years before the 2027 election.
• As of 2026, Ruto governs with his broadened coalition, the cost of living and public debt are the biggest issues in Kenyan politics, and all eyes are on the 2027 election.