Kenya

The republic of kenya is a relatively young geopolitical entity, having gained independence from British rule in 1963. Yet, the area that comprises present-day Kenya and its East African neighbors has been called the cradle of humankind, due to fossil evidence that suggests the region has been a hub of hominine activity for over 4 million years. While Kenya's landscapes are renown for their wildlife, nature reserves, and national parks, continuous human and prehuman presence means they are entirely anthropogenic.

Kenya is bordered by the Indian Ocean and Somalia to the east, Ethiopia to the north, Sudan to the northwest, Uganda and Lake Victoria to the west, and Tanzania to the south. The country is bisected by the equator. With an area of approximately 225,000 square miles (about twice the size of Arizona), Kenya has great geographic diversity. It includes wide, sandy beaches and coral reefs along the coastal belt; the Eastern African plateau with its semiarid plains; the Rift Valley, its series of lakes, and its surrounding fertile uplands; northern deserts; and Mt. Kenya's snow-capped peaks at 5,199 meters above sea level, making it Africa's second tallest mountain, the tallest being neighboring Tanzania's Mt. Kilimanjaro.

The few millennia prior to colonization saw population increases and subsistence practice shifts due to in-migrations of Cushitic, Nilotic, and Bantu speakers. Although Arab traders had settled the East African coast a millennium beforehand and established a string of thriving Swahili city–states, the Berlin Conference (1884–85) marked the beginning of colonial demarcation of African land, through which Britain claimed an area including today's Kenya. The Imperial British East Africa Company (IBEAC) received a royal charter in 1888 to “prepare” the colony and promote its commercial interests, and to some degree it did. However, the IBEAC went bankrupt by 1895, after which the British government assumed direct control over Kenya.

By the mid–1890s, the British had relocated, recruited, and imported enough people to begin work on the Kenya–Uganda railway. With its railhead in Nairobi, the railway stretched from coastal Mombasa to Lake Victoria by 1901, thus further opening the interior of Kenya to British and Asian settlers, [Page 982]farmers, and traders. British colonists restricted access to land and animals, relocated Africans (Maasai and Gikuyu) into reserves, and established means by which they could act upon the Dual Mandate: the notion that the colonial enterprise was not only meant to benefit resource-challenged, industrial and expansionist Britain, but also to enable the “development” of Africans. A British crown colony by 1920, Kenya Colony attracted increasing numbers of white settlers, whose social and economic investments in Kenya severely disrupted the ideals of indirect rule established by the British crown. Settlers and colonial administrators relied on the labor of colonized peoples to build the infrastructure for transporting cash crops and other raw materials to Europe. Colonial rule imposed systems of taxation, compulsory labor, cash-based markets, and limited, skills-based education on Africans.

Kenya's expansive game reserves were meant to serve colonists and elites from abroad. The game reserves of the late 1890s and early 1900s were eventually replaced by national parks and reserves (1946 onward), as well as a conservationism that led to a thriving tourist industry and a post-colonial ban on sport hunting in the 1970s.

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