History of Kenya
Modern ethnicities Diaspora Performing arts Government agencies Television Radio Newspapers A part of Eastern Africa, the territory of what is known as Kenya has seen human habitation since the beginning of the Lower Paleolithic.
There were allegations that his rival Raila Odinga actually won the contest; however, the Supreme Court, through a thorough review of evidence adduced, found no malpractice during the conduct of the 2013 general election both from the IEBC and the Jubilee Party of Uhuru Kenyatta.
Evidence was found in 2018, dating to about 320,000 years ago, at the Kenyan site of Olorgesailie, of the early emergence of modern behaviors including: long-distance trade networks (involving goods such as obsidian), the use of pigments, and the possible making of projectile points.
Eburran hunter gatherers, who had lived in the Ol Doinyo Eburru volcano complex near Lake Nakuru for thousands of years, start adopting livestock around this period.
Archaeological findings have shown that by 100 BCE to 300 AD, Bantu-speaking communities were present at the coastal areas of Misasa in Tanzania, Kwale in Kenya, and Ras Hafun in Somalia.
The Portuguese presence in East Africa officially began after 1505, when a naval force under the command of Dom Francisco de Almeida conquered Kilwa, an island located in the south-east of present-day Tanzania.
In the south, pastoralists and cultivators bartered goods and competed for land as long-distance caravan routes linked them to the Kenyan coast on the east and to the kingdoms of Uganda on the west.
[58] Arab governance of all the major ports along the East African coast continued until British interests aimed particularly at securing their 'Indian Jewel' and creation of a system of trade among individuals began to put pressure on Omani rule.
When colonial rule was established and efficiency was sought, partly because of settler pressure, newly educated younger men were associated with old chiefs in local Native Councils.
Completely cut off from Germany, von Lettow conducted an effective guerilla warfare campaign, living off the land, capturing British supplies, and remaining undefeated.
To chase von Lettow the British deployed Indian Army troops from India and then needed large numbers of porters to overcome the formidable logistics of transporting supplies far into the interior by foot.
Pressure on ordinary Kenyans by governments in a hurry to modernise in the 1930s to 1950s enabled the mass political parties to acquire support for "centrally" focused movements, but even these often relied on local communicators.
Historian Charles Mowat explained the issues: In the Second World War (1939–1945) Kenya became an important British military base for successful campaigns against Italy in the Italian Somaliland and Ethiopia.
The social and economic connotations of KAR service, combined with the massive wartime expansion of Kenyan defence forces, created a new class of modernised Africans with distinctive characteristics and interests.
Relying on concepts of trusteeship and scientific management, they imposed a number of changes in crop production and agrarian techniques, claiming to promote conservation and "betterment" of farming in the colonial tribal reserves.
While criticised as backward by British officials and white settlers, African farming proved resilient and Kikuyu farmers engaged in widespread resistance to the colonial state's agrarian reforms.
Pressures of overpopulation and the prospects of cash crops, already in evidence by 1945, made this subsistence economic system increasingly obsolete and accelerated a movement to commercial agriculture and emigration to cities.
KAU acted as a constituency association for the first black member of Kenya's legislative council, Eliud Mathu, who had been nominated in 1944 by the governor after consulting élite African opinion.
To support its military campaign of counter-insurgency the colonial government embarked on agrarian reforms that stripped white settlers of many of their former protections; for example, Africans were for the first time allowed to grow coffee, the major cash crop.
This inspired Tom Mboya to begin a programme conceptualised by a close confidante Dr. Blasio Vincent Oriedo, funded by Americans, of sending talented youth to the United States for higher education.
The British and KANU agreed, over KADU protests, to constitutional changes in October 1963 strengthening the central government thus ensuring that Kenya would be a de facto single-party state.
[99] The minority party, the Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU), representing a coalition of small tribes that had feared dominance by larger ones, dissolved itself voluntarily in 1964 and former members joined KANU.
[105] Ignoring his suppression of the opposition and continued factionalism within KANU the imposition of one-party rule allowed Mzee ("Old Man") Kenyatta, who had led the country since independence, to claim he had achieved "political stability."
[52] On 1 August 1982, lower-level air force personnel, led by Senior Private Grade-I Hezekiah Ochuka and backed by university students, attempted a coup d'état to oust Moi.
Moi's government in 1993 agreed to economic reforms long urged by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which restored enough aid for Kenya to service its $7.5 billion foreign debt.
Moi sponsored irregular army units that attacked the Luo, Luhya and Kikuyu communities, and he denied his responsibility by attributing the violence to ethnic clashes arising from land dispute.
Social conditions deteriorated for ordinary Kenyans, who faced a growing wave of routine crime in urban areas; pitched battles between ethnic groups fighting for land; and a feud between the police and the Mungiki sect, which left over 120 people dead in May–November 2007 alone.
The ODM charged the Kikuyu with having grabbed everything and all the other tribes having lost; that Kibaki had betrayed his promises for change; that crime and violence were out of control, and that economic growth was not bringing any benefits to the ordinary citizen.
It pitted today's majimboists, represented by Odinga, who campaigned for regionalism, against Kibaki, who stood for the status quo of a highly centralised government that has delivered considerable economic growth but has repeatedly displayed the problems of too much power concentrated in too few hands – corruption, aloofness, favouritism and its flip side, marginalisation.
However the Luo lost prominence due to the success of Kikuyu and related groups (Embu and Meru) in gaining and exercising political power during the Jomo Kenyatta era (1963–1978).
