Prehistory and Early History: Eastern Africa may have provided the setting for the earliest development of the human species. Archaeologists working in the Rift Valley region, beginning with Mary and Louis Leakey in the 1930s, have unearthed fossils of several species of protohumans dating to as much as 20 million years ago. Recent finds near Kenya’s Lake Turkana indicate that hominids lived in the area 2.6 million years ago. Ancestors of modern Kenya’s population began arriving in the region around 2000 B.C., when Cushitic-speaking pastoralists migrated south from the Ethiopia highlands. Between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500, Nilotic speakers arrived, along with Bantu-speaking peoples, who now make up three-quarters of Kenya’s population.

On Kenya’s coast, trade with the nearby Arabian Peninsula was well-established by A.D. 100. In the medieval period, Arabs settled on the coast, establishing several autonomous city-states (including Mombasa, Malindi, and Pate) ruled by sultans. As Arabs and the local Bantu-speaking tribes intermarried, a distinct civilization and a new language emerged, a mixture of Arabic and Bantu, called Swahili. Swahili became the lingua franca of the coastal trade that exchanged trade goods from Kenya’s interior⎯animal skins, ivory and horn, agricultural produce, and slaves⎯for goods from the Middle East and even the Far East. Arab dominance on the coast was eclipsed by the arrival in 1498 of the Portuguese, whose control gave way in turn to renewed Arab control under the Imam of Oman in the 1600s. In the mid-nineteenth century, British influence superseded that of the Arabs. Unlike their Arab predecessors, the British showed interest in controlling land beyond the coastal region and encouraged European explorers to map the interior.

Colonial Era: British colonial control of Kenya dates from the Berlin Conference of 1885, when the European powers partitioned East Africa into spheres of influence, with present-day Kenya passing to the British. Beginning in 1895, a railroad was built from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria in order to facilitate trade with the interior and with Uganda. The British government established the East African Protectorate and in 1920 made Kenya a British crown colony. The British opened the fertile highlands to white settlers, who established themselves as large-scale farmers. Extensive tracts of the best land were taken from Africans and reserved for white settlers, who eventually gained control of the colonial government. The white settler-dominated government denied the dispossessed Africans political participation, restricted their cultivation of cash crops such as coffee, permitted forced labor, and maintained a “white highlands” policy that restricted the Kikuyu, one of the largest tribes, to overcrowded reserves. Other tribes and non-whites such as East Indians also faced restrictions.

Protest by Africans, which began in the 1920s, peaked between 1952 and 1956 with the so-called “Mau-Mau” Emergency, an armed Kikuyu-led insurrection directed against white settler domination and British colonial rule. The British put Kenya under a state of emergency until 1959 and imprisoned many of the colony’s nationalist leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a British-educated Kikuyu and an activist since the 1920s. After the Mau-Mau revolt abated, Britain increased African representation in the colony’s legislative council until, in 1961, there was an African majority. Kenya became independent on December 12, 1963, and the next year became a republic and joined the Commonwealth. Kenyatta, head of the Kenya African National Union (KANU), became Kenya’s first president.

Independence under Kenyatta: Kenyatta engineered successive measures that increased the powers vested in the presidency, giving the executive, for example, the power to detain political opponents without trial if they posed a threat to public order. By 1969, KANU was the sole political party in a de facto one-party state. To forestall opposition and tribal conflict, Kenyatta relied on largesse, dispensing offices⎯with all the wealth such patronage entailed⎯across ethnic groups. In the economy, he pursued pro-Western, essentially free-market capitalist policies. Seeking to stem the outflow of capital underway since 1961, he backed policies favorable to foreign investors and conciliated white settlers (55,000 in 1962). Foreign investors were free to remit profits and to own property, albeit sometimes on condition of some government co-ownership. Whites were guaranteed ownership rights to land and to compensation if they chose to leave. Kenyatta supported the distribution of white settler land to Africans through land purchase and struck a deal with Britain to help finance a massive land purchase. This “Africanization” of land included the transfer of more than 6,070 square kilometers of land to a group of well-connected Kenyans, mainly Kikuyu, and fostered the emergence of a new privileged class of African plantation owners. To counter criticism for catering to the privileged, Kenyatta also backed the distribution to Africans of hundreds of thousands of smallholdings and spent a third of the national budget on education. These policies brought sufficiently widespread improvement in living standards to ensure continuing support for the government.

Under Kenyatta’s presidency, Kenya’s economic performance was better than most in Africa. The rate of economic growth was among the highest on the continent. Despite severe drought, two oil shocks, ethnic conflicts, and border skirmishes, Kenya’s gross national product grew on average at more than 6 percent a year, almost fivefold from 1971 to 1981. At the same time, the economy remained heavily dependent on a limited range of primary commodity exports and highly vulnerable to fluctuations in world commodity prices. Growth also generated tremendous disparities of wealth, much of which was in the hands of Kenyatta’s family and close associates. This concentration of wealth, along with an extremely high rate of population growth, meant that most Kenyans did not realize a correspondingly large increase in per capita well-being under Kenyatta’s leadership.

The Moi Presidency and the New Kibaki Government: At Kenyatta’s death at age 86 in August 1978, Vice President Daniel arap Moi succeeded him as president. Popular at first, Moi promised to tackle corruption, limit foreign ownership of industry, review his predecessor’s land allocation policies and the self-enrichment of the ruling group, and abolish primary school fees. As a deteriorating economy necessitated austerity measures and aroused opposition, however, Moi began to follow in Kenyatta’s autocratic footsteps. In June 1982, the ruling party, KANU, had the National Assembly amend the constitution to make Kenya officially a one-party state and KANU the sole legal party. The same year, Moi weathered a coup attempt by junior ranks of the air force, 1,000 of whom he court-martialed. To discourage opposition, he dismantled the air force and closed the universities for a time. Throughout the 1980s, he further tightened political control even as corruption spread among his cohorts. Eventually, Western powers and international financial donor agencies balked at continuing to provide Kenya with vital financial aid. By the 1990s, they intermittently suspended grants and loans, pending political and economic reforms and improvement in the records on human rights and corruption. In 1991 Moi finally bowed to pressure from donors and opposition groups and agreed to an amendment reinstating multiparty elections. In 1992, in the first multiparty elections in 26 years, the ethnically fractured opposition failed to dislodge Moi and KANU from power. Moi also held onto power in the 1997 elections, amid charges of electoral fraud, rampant corruption, and lack of public safety, and despite ongoing deterioration in many economic indicators. Moi’s fifth and final term was marked by continuing suspensions of donor aid and the first proof of Kenya’s vulnerability to international terrorism, the August 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.

Forced under the constitution to retire in December 2002, Moi engineered the nomination of Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Kenya’s first leader, as KANU’s candidate for president. Mwai Kibaki, who ran against Moi in 1992 and 1997 and once was his vice president, was the candidate of the multiethnic, united opposition group, the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC). Kibaki won decisively, and NARC achieved a solid parliamentary majority on an anticorruption platform. The election, although not free of vote-rigging, was the most credible since independence. Kibaki now confronts major challenges in holding the ruling NARC together. The constituent parties of NARC are divided over the draft of a new constitution, which contains controversial proposals, including, for example, a new office of prime minister, an upper chamber of parliament, devolution of powers to district level, and constitutional recognition of Islamic courts.

Apart from the challenge of achieving cross-party consensus on a new constitution, the Kibaki administration faces long-standing problems inherited from his predecessor—a sluggish agriculture-based economy, rundown infrastructure, poverty rates exceeding 50 percent, endemic corruption, spiraling crime, and a heavy burden of disease, including human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS). In addition, Kenya has seen growing ethnic tensions between coastal Muslims and other Kenyans about the former’s perceived exclusion from power. Also, new acts of terrorism in Mombasa alarmed authorities in November 2003, prompting travel advisories by Western governments. The early months of the Kibaki administration witnessed much progress, with the introduction of universal free primary education, the adoption of anticorruption measures, and a cleanup of the judiciary. International financial institutions, which had suspended development assistance in previous years, gave the new administration an early vote of confidence by resuming aid. Already by 2004, however, donor countries and agencies were alarmed about the slackening efforts to combat high-level corruption and to pursue legal action against Moi and others of the Moi era. The resignation in February 2005 of Kenya’s competent and honest anticorruption tsar prompted the United States and Germany to cut back on aid. Britain, the largest foreign investor, deplored a resurgence of graft as a major threat to much-needed economic and social reform.