Kenya
Kenya, officially the Republic of Kenya, is a country located in East Africa. With an estimated population of more than 53.3 million as of mid-2025, Kenya is the 27th-most populous country in the world and the seventh-most populous in Africa. Kenya's capital and largest city is Nairobi. The second-largest and oldest city is Mombasa, a major port city located on Mombasa Island. Other major cities within the country include Kisumu, Nakuru and Eldoret. Going clockwise, Kenya is bordered by South Sudan to the northwest, Ethiopia to the north, Somalia to the east, the Indian Ocean to the southeast, Tanzania to the southwest, and Lake Victoria and Uganda to the west.
Kenya's geography, climate and population vary widely. In western Rift Valley counties, the landscape includes cold, snow-capped mountaintops with vast surrounding forests, wildlife, and fertile agricultural regions in temperate climates. In other areas there are dry, arid, and semi-arid climates, as well as absolute deserts.
Kenya's earliest inhabitants included some of the first humans to evolve from ancestral members of the genus Homo. Ample fossil evidence for this evolutionary history has been found at Koobi Fora. Later, Kenya was inhabited by hunter-gatherers similar to the present-day Hadza people. According to archaeological dating of associated artifacts and skeletal material, Cushitic speakers first settled in the region's lowlands between 3,200 and 1,300 BC, a phase known as the Lowland Savanna Pastoral Neolithic. Nilotic-speaking pastoralists began migrating from present-day South Sudan into Kenya around 500 BC. Bantu people settled at the coast and the interior between 250 BC and 500 AD.
European contact began in 1500 AD with the Portuguese Empire, and effective colonisation of Kenya began in the 19th century during the European exploration of Africa. Modern-day Kenya emerged from a protectorate, established by the British Empire in 1895, and the subsequent Kenya Colony, which began in 1920. Mombasa was the capital of the British East Africa Protectorate, which included most of what is now Kenya and southwestern Somalia, from 1889 to 1907. Numerous disputes between the UK and the colony led to the Mau Mau revolution, which began in 1952, and the declaration of Kenya's independence in 1963. After independence, Kenya remained a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. The country's current constitution was adopted in 2010, replacing the previous 1963 constitution.
Kenya is a presidential representative democratic republic, in which elected officials represent the people and the president is the head of state and government. The country is a member of the United Nations, the Commonwealth, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, COMESA, International Criminal Court, as well as several other international organisations. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States.
Kenya's economy is the largest in East and Central Africa, with Nairobi serving as a major regional commercial hub. With a per-capita Gross National Income of $2,110, the country is a lower-middle-income economy. Agriculture is the country's largest economic sector; tea and coffee are the sector's traditional cash crops, while fresh flowers are a fast-growing export. The service industry, particularly tourism, is also one of the country's major economic drivers. Kenya is a member of the East African Community trade bloc, though some international trade organisations categorise it as part of the Greater Horn of Africa. Africa is Kenya's largest export market, followed by the European Union.
Etymology
The Republic of Kenya is named after Mount Kenya. The earliest recorded version of the modern name was written by German explorer Johann Ludwig Krapf in the 19th century. While travelling with a Kamba caravan led by the long-distance trader Chief Kivoi, Krapf spotted the mountain peak and asked what it was called. Kivoi told him "Kĩ-Nyaa" or "Kĩlĩma- Kĩinyaa", probably because the pattern of black rock and white snow on its peaks reminded him of the feathers of the male ostrich. In archaic Kikuyu, the word 'nyaga' or more commonly 'manyaganyaga' is used to describe an extremely bright object. The Agikuyu, who inhabit the slopes of Mt. Kenya, call it Kĩrĩma Kĩrĩnyaga in Kikuyu, while the Embu call it "Ki-nyaga". All three names have the same meaning.Ludwig Krapf recorded the name as both Kenia and Kegnia. Some have said that this was a precise notation of the African pronunciation. An 1882 map drawn by Joseph Thompsons, a Scottish geologist and naturalist, indicated Mt. Kenya as Mt. Kenia. The mountain's name was accepted, pars pro toto, as the name of the country. It did not come into widespread official use during the early colonial period, when the country was referred to as the East African Protectorate. The official name was changed to the Colony of Kenya in 1920.
History
Prehistory
species, such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus, possibly the direct ancestors of modern Homo sapiens, had lived in Kenya in the Pleistocene epoch. East Africa, including Kenya, is one of the earliest regions where modern humans are believed to have lived. In 1984, during excavations at Lake Turkana palaeoanthropologist Richard Leakey, assisted by Kamoya Kimeu, had discovered the Turkana Boy, a 1.6-million-year-old Homo erectus fossil. Further evidence of Kenya's prehistory was found in 2018, namely the early emergence of modern behaviours, including long-distance trade networks, the use of pigments, and possibly the making of projectile points, about 320,000 years ago. The authors of three 2018 studies on the site suggest that complex and modern behaviours had already begun in Africa around the time of the emergence of Homo sapiens.The first inhabitants of present-day Kenya were hunter-gatherer groups, akin to the modern Khoisan speakers. These people were later largely replaced by agropastoralist Cushitic, who originated from the Horn of Africa. During the early Holocene, the region's climate shifted from drier to wetter conditions. This provided an opportunity for the development of cultural traditions such as agriculture and herding in a more favourable environment.
Around 500 BC, Nilotic-speaking pastoralists started migrating from what is now southern Sudan into Kenya. Today, the country's Nilotic ethnic groups include the Kalenjin, Samburu, Luo, Turkana, and Maasai.
By the first millennium AD, Bantu-speaking farmers had moved into the region, initially along the Kenyan coast. The Bantus had originated in West Africa along the Benue River in what is now eastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. The Bantu migration brought new developments in agriculture and ironworking to the region. Today, the country's Bantu groups include the Kikuyu, Luhya, Kamba, Kisii, Meru, Kuria, Aembu, Ambeere, Wadawida-Watuweta, Wapokomo, and Mijikenda, among many others.
Notable prehistoric sites in the interior of Kenya include the site Namoratunga on the west side of Lake Turkana and the walled settlement of Thimlich Ohinga in Migori County.
Swahili trade period
The coastline of Kenya was home to communities of ironworkers and Bantu subsistence farmers, hunters, and fishers who supported the region's economy with agriculture, fishing, metal production, and trade with foreign countries. These communities formed the earliest city-states in the region, which were collectively known as Azania. The Swahili people were of mixed African and Asian ancestry, as DNA evidence has revealed.By the 1st century CE, many of the area's city-states, such as Mombasa, Malindi, and Zanzibar, began to establish trading relations with the Arabs. This led to increased economic growth of the Swahili states, the introduction of Islam, Arabic influences on the Swahili language, cultural diffusion, as well as the Swahili city-states becoming members of a larger trade network. Many historians had long believed that the city-states were established by Arab or Persian traders, but archaeological evidence has led scholars to recognise the city-states as an indigenous development which, though subjected to foreign influence due to trade, retained a Bantu cultural core.
The Kilwa Sultanate was a medieval sultanate centred at Kilwa, in modern-day Tanzania. At its height, its authority stretched over the entire length of the Swahili Coast, including Kenya. Beginning in the 10th century, the rulers of Kilwa would go on to build elaborate coral mosques and introduce copper coinage.
Swahili, a Bantu language with Arabic, Persian, and other Middle-Eastern and South Asian loanwords, later developed as a lingua franca for trade between the different peoples. Since the turn of the 20th century, Swahili has also adopted numerous loanwords and calques from English, many of which originated during the era of British colonial rule.
Early Portuguese presence
The Swahili built Mombasa into a major port city and established trade links with other nearby city-states, as well as commercial centres in Persia, Arabia, and even India. By the 15th century, Portuguese voyager Duarte Barbosa wrote that "Mombasa is a place of great traffic and has a good harbour in which there are always moored small craft of many kinds and also great ships, both of which are bound from Sofala and others which come from Cambay and Melinde and others which sail to the island of Zanzibar."One major city on the Kenyan coast is Malindi. It has been an important Swahili settlement since the 14th century, and the city once rivalled Mombasa for dominance in the African Great Lakes region. Malindi has traditionally been a friendly port city for foreign powers. In 1414, the Chinese trader and explorer Zheng He, representing the Ming Dynasty, visited the East African coast on one of his last 'treasure voyages'. Malindi also welcomed the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498.
In the 17th century, the Swahili coast was conquered by the Omani Arabs, who expanded the slave trade to meet the demands of plantations in Oman and Zanzibar. Initially, these traders came mainly from Oman, but later many came from Zanzibar. In addition, the Portuguese started buying slaves from the Omani and Zanzibari traders in response to the interruption of the transatlantic slave trade by British abolitionists.