150 stories spanning millions of years of Kenyan history.
Long before Kenya was a name, before borders, before language as we know it, hands were shaping stone in the Rift...
In 1984, on the western shores of Lake Turkana, a team led by Richard Leakey made the most complete early human...
They came from the highlands of what is now Ethiopia, moving south in search of grazing land and water. The...
They walked from West and Central Africa in one of the great human migrations of all time. The Bantu-speaking peoples...
Arab and Persian sailors had known about the East African coast for centuries. The monsoon winds made the journey...
While the coast traded with the world, the interior of Kenya was being shaped by another great migration. The Nilotic...
For six hundred years, the Swahili city-states of the East African coast enjoyed a golden age that the world has...
When Vasco da Gama sailed into Malindi in 1498, he carried more than a flag and cannons. He carried Christianity, and...
In April 1498, three Portuguese ships appeared on the horizon off Malindi. Their captain was Vasco da Gama. He was the...
The Portuguese did not ask for trade partnerships. They came with warships and demanded submission. In 1500, they...
In the western highlands near what would become Mumias, a kingdom was taking shape. The Wanga Kingdom, led by rulers...
The Portuguese needed a permanent base on the East African coast, something that would make their presence impossible...
For thirty-three months, a small Portuguese garrison held Fort Jesus against an Omani siege. They were surrounded by...
The East African coast had known slavery for centuries. But under Omani rule, the trade expanded to industrial scale....
The Mazrui Arab clan that governed Mombasa on behalf of the Omani Sultan had grown tired of submitting to Oman. In...
From the 1840s onwards, long-distance trade caravans began pushing deep into the interior of what would become Kenya....
In 1844, Johann Ludwig Krapf, a German missionary working for the Church Missionary Society, established the first...
In 1849, Johann Rebmann, a colleague of Krapf at the Rabai mission, became the first European to see Mount Kilimanjaro....
In the winter of 1884-85, the major European powers gathered in Berlin to divide Africa among themselves. Not a single...
In 1888, the British government granted a royal charter to the Imperial British East Africa Company, a private...
When British Captain Frederick Lugard arrived in western Kenya in 1890, Nabongo Mumia of the Wanga Kingdom made a...
For sixteen years, the Nandi people of the western highlands resisted British colonial rule under the leadership of...
On 1 July 1895, the British government formally declared the East Africa Protectorate, taking over from the bankrupt...
They called it the Lunatic Express. A railway from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, 900 kilometres through desert,...
Between March and December 1898, two maneless male lions killed an unknown number of workers on the Uganda Railway...
In 1899, a railway camp was set up in the middle of a swampy plain that the Maasai called Enkare Nyirobi, cool water....
On 19 December 1901, the last spike was driven into the Uganda Railway at Port Florence, later renamed Kisumu, on the...
The fertile highlands of central Kenya were among the most productive agricultural land in the world. They were also...
In 1904 and again in 1911, the British colonial government forced the Maasai people into two agreements that remain...
In 1907, the British colonial administration moved its headquarters from Mombasa to Nairobi. It was a practical...
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, it spilled immediately into Africa. German East Africa (now Tanzania) bordered...
In 1915, the British colonial government passed the Crown Lands Ordinance, declaring that all land in Kenya, including...
In 1920, the East Africa Protectorate was formally renamed the Kenya Colony and Protectorate. It was more than a name...
Harry Thuku was a young telephone operator in Nairobi who had read enough to understand what was being done to his...
In 1923, the British government issued the Devonshire Declaration, a policy paper that declared that African interests...
In 1929, a young Kikuyu man named Johnstone Kamau, who would later call himself Jomo Kenyatta, boarded a ship to...
When the Second World War began, tens of thousands of Kenyans were conscripted or volunteered to fight for Britain....
In 1944, the Kenya African Union was founded, the first organisation that tried to represent Africans from all...
Waruhiu Itote was a Kenya Army veteran of World War Two who had fought in Burma, Ethiopia and Ceylon for the British...
The Mau Mau movement was not held together by an army command structure. It was held together by oaths. Administered in...
They called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. The British called them Mau Mau. They were primarily Kikuyu...
On 20 October 1952, the British colonial government declared a State of Emergency in Kenya. It was a response to the...
In April 1953, Jomo Kenyatta was convicted of managing the Mau Mau at a trial that many legal scholars have since...
In April 1954, the British colonial government launched Operation Anvil, the largest security operation in the history...
At the height of the Mau Mau crackdown, the British colonial government constructed what they called the Pipeline, a...
He was the commander of the Mau Mau forces in the forests of the Aberdares, the most feared guerrilla fighter in Kenya....
In February 1957, Africans in Kenya were allowed to vote in elections for the first time. Eight seats in the...
In January 1960, representatives of Kenya's African, European and Asian communities gathered at Lancaster House in...
In May 1960, the Kenya African National Union was formed from a merger of several African political organisations. Its...
In August 1961, Jomo Kenyatta was released from detention after nine years. He was 72 years old. The British had hoped...
When Kenya's flag was designed for independence in 1963, every colour carried weight. Black for the Kenyan people. Red...
At the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, Kenya competed under the British flag. In 1964, at the Tokyo Olympics, Kenya competed...
When Kenya needed a national anthem for independence, it turned to a prayer. Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu, Oh God of All...
At the stroke of midnight on 12 December 1963, the Union Jack was lowered and the black, red and green flag of Kenya...
Exactly one year after independence, Kenya took the next step. The country was declared a Republic, severing the final...
When Jomo Kenyatta stood at independence and said Harambee, pull together, he was invoking a tradition that already...
Oginga Odinga had been one of the architects of Kenyan independence. He was Kenyatta's Vice President. But by 1966, the...
In 1966, the Central Bank of Kenya was established, giving the country its own monetary authority for the first time....
At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, Kipchoge Keino was suffering from a gallbladder infection so severe that he collapsed...
Tom Mboya was 38 years old, charismatic, brilliant, internationally connected and widely seen as a future president of...
The Nairobi Stock Exchange, now the Nairobi Securities Exchange, was founded in 1954 during the colonial era but came...
In 1974, Kenya made Kiswahili a co-official language alongside English. It was more than a policy change. It was a...
Josiah Mwangi Kariuki was a Member of Parliament who had survived the Mau Mau detention camps and emerged with a...
Ngugi wa Thiong'o was already one of Africa's most celebrated writers when he made the decision that would land him in...
For decades, the Voice of Kenya radio service was how most Kenyans experienced national life. Before television was...
Jomo Kenyatta, the father of the nation, died on 22 August 1978 after fifteen years as Kenya's first and only...
When Daniel arap Moi succeeded Kenyatta in 1978, he adopted a political philosophy he called Nyayo, meaning footsteps...
In the years after independence, a new sound emerged from western Kenya and spread across the country. Benga music,...
In June 1982, the Kenyan parliament passed a constitutional amendment, Section 2A, declaring KANU the only legal...
When Ngugi wa Thiong'o was detained without trial in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in 1977-78, he had no paper. He...
At dawn on 1 August 1982, junior officers of the Kenya Air Force seized the radio station in Nairobi and announced that...
In 1984, one of the worst droughts in living memory struck northern Kenya. The semi-arid regions of Turkana, Marsabit...
In 1984, paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey and his team working at Nariokotome near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya...
In 1985, Nairobi hosted the World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the United Nations Decade for...
Wangari Maathai had been planting trees since 1977. By the mid-1980s, the Green Belt Movement she founded had planted...
In 1988, Kenya held elections under a system so designed for manipulation that it became a global byword for electoral...
When John Ngugi won the 5,000 metres at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, he was completing a tradition that Kenya had been...
When the government of Daniel arap Moi announced plans to build a 60-storey skyscraper in Uhuru Park, Nairobi's most...
Dr. Robert Ouko was Kenya's Foreign Minister, brilliant, respected internationally, and increasingly uncomfortable with...
On 18 July 1989, in front of television cameras from around the world, Kenyan Wildlife Service director Richard Leakey...
In 1990, a group of former politicians, lawyers and activists formed FORD, the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy,...
For years, domestic activists and international donors had been demanding the return of multiparty democracy to Kenya....
In the months before Kenya's first multiparty elections in 1992, violence erupted in the Rift Valley. Communities that...
On 7 July 1990, a date that gives the event its name, Saba Saba meaning seven seven in Swahili, Kenyans took to the...
In the early 1990s, a company called Goldenberg International defrauded the Kenyan government of over $600 million...
The translation of the Bible into Kiswahili, completed in various versions over the 19th and 20th centuries, was one of...
Kenya's greatest living writer, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, made one of the most radical decisions in African literary history...
In 1994, Safaricom and Airtel (then Kencell) launched mobile phone services in Kenya. The phones were expensive, the...
Daniel Komen was 20 years old and largely unknown outside athletics when he broke the world record for 3,000 metres in...
At 10:30 in the morning of 7 August 1998, a truck bomb exploded outside the US Embassy in the centre of Nairobi. The...
El Nino came to Kenya in 1997-98 with devastating force. The rains that fell were not ordinary rains. Roads were swept...
On an island of coral rock at the edge of the Indian Ocean, a city was being born. Mombasa, which Kenyan school history...
In 2000, a team led by paleoanthropologist Brigitte Senut discovered a fossil in the Tugen Hills of the Baringo...
Around the 7th and 8th centuries AD, as Arab merchants began settling along the East African coast, they brought with...
While Kenya has never qualified for the FIFA World Cup in football, the country's athletics dominance on the global...
On 28 November 2002, suicide bombers attacked the Paradise Hotel near Mombasa, a destination popular with Israeli...
For 39 years, the Kenya African National Union had governed Kenya. It had won independence, built the nation and then...
When Mwai Kibaki won the 2002 election, he signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Raila Odinga and the Liberal...
When Mwai Kibaki took office in January 2003, one of his first acts was to abolish school fees for primary education....
By the mid-2000s, Kenyan athletes had done something that seemed statistically impossible. They were winning not just...
On 8 October 2004, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced that the Peace Prize was going to Wangari Maathai of Kenya....
In November 2005, Kenyans voted on a new draft constitution. The government of Mwai Kibaki, which had come to power on...
In March 2007, Safaricom launched a mobile money service called M-Pesa. The idea was simple: let people send money...
In 2007, the Kibaki government launched Vision 2030, a long-term development blueprint intended to transform Kenya into...
Uchumi Supermarkets was founded in 1975 as a government-supported retail chain designed to bring modern shopping to...
On 27 December 2007, Kenya held a presidential election. On 30 December, the Electoral Commission announced Mwai Kibaki...
In February 2008, as post-election violence raged across Kenya and the death toll climbed past a thousand, former UN...
On 4 November 2008, Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States and the first Black man to hold...
In 2009, Equity Bank became the largest bank in Kenya by number of accounts, overtaking the long-established commercial...
By 2010, Iten, a small town perched at 2,400 metres in the Rift Valley highlands, had become one of the most famous...
By 2010, a new generation of Kenyan filmmakers was making films that did not apologise for being Kenyan. Productions...
When Kenya announced plans to build a new Standard Gauge Railway from Mombasa to Nairobi, connecting the port to the...
On 27 August 2010, Kenyans approved a new constitution by 68 percent of the vote. It was the culmination of years of...
On 25 September 2011, Wangari Maathai died of ovarian cancer in Nairobi. She was 71 years old. She had lived long...
In 2012, Tullow Oil announced the discovery of commercially viable oil deposits in Turkana County in northern Kenya....
On 4 March 2013, Uhuru Kenyatta was elected President of Kenya by 50.07 percent of the vote, just enough to avoid a...
When Nairobi Half Life was submitted as Kenya's entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2013, it...
After the 2007-08 post-election violence, the International Criminal Court indicted six Kenyans, including Uhuru...
On a Saturday afternoon in September 2013, gunmen from the Somali militant group Al-Shabaab stormed the Westgate...
Kenyan rugby sevens has been one of the country's most joyful sporting stories of the 21st century. The Kenya Sevens...
By 2015, Nairobi had earned a new name: Silicon Savannah. The city had become home to more technology startups per...
In July 2015, President Barack Obama made his first official visit to Kenya as President of the United States. He was...
On 2 April 2015, four Al-Shabaab gunmen attacked Garissa University College in northeastern Kenya. They separated...
By 2016, Kenyans living abroad were sending home over $1.5 billion annually in remittances, making the diaspora one of...
While Kenya's traditional commercial banks competed for corporate clients, Equity Bank continued its expansion into the...
When Eliud Kipchoge won gold in the marathon at the 2016 Rio Olympics, he did not just win a race. He began rewriting...
On 1 June 2017, Kenya's national day, the first Standard Gauge Railway train departed from Mombasa and arrived in...
In 2017, a severe drought struck northern Kenya. In Turkana, Marsabit and Mandera counties, pastoralists watched their...
In August 2017, the Supreme Court of Kenya did something that no court in African history had done before. It annulled...
When Safaricom launched M-Pesa in Ethiopia in 2022, it was the latest expansion of the service that had changed the...
When the World Cross Country Championships came to Aarhus, Denmark in 2019, Kenya's team arrived expecting to win. They...
Nairobi's traffic problem had become legendary. A city of five million people served by road infrastructure designed...
Kenya Airways, known as the Pride of Africa, has been the country's national carrier since 1977. Over the decades, its...
On 12 October 2019, in the Prater park in Vienna, Austria, Eliud Kipchoge ran 42.195 kilometres in 1 hour 59 minutes...
Forty kilometres south of Nairobi, the government began constructing Konza Technopolis, an entirely new city designed...
Gengetone, a genre that emerged from Nairobi's housing estates in the late 2010s, was raw, urban, sexually explicit and...
Since Kenya sent troops into Somalia in October 2011 to fight Al-Shabaab, the militant group has responded with a...
On 13 March 2020, Kenya confirmed its first case of COVID-19. The patient had returned from the United States. Within...
In March 2018, in a moment that stunned Kenya, President Uhuru Kenyatta and opposition leader Raila Odinga shook hands...
Faith Chepngetich Kipyegon from Kerio Valley in the Rift Valley is the greatest 1,500-metre runner in history. She won...
In 2021, the World Bank reclassified Kenya as a lower-middle-income country, reflecting decades of economic growth....
When Lupita Nyong'o walked onto the stage at the 2014 Academy Awards and accepted the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress...
Kenya's rural electrification programme, which accelerated dramatically in the 2010s under the Last Mile Connectivity...
When Timothy Cheruiyot won the 1,500 metres at the World Athletics Championships in 2019 and 2022, he extended a...
By 2022, Nairobi was home to an estimated 60 percent of its population living in informal settlements, areas without...
The 2022 Kenyan election between William Ruto's Kenya Kwanza coalition and Raila Odinga's Azimio la Umoja was unusual...
On 9 August 2022, Kenyans went to the polls in what became one of the most closely watched elections in the country's...
By 2023, Kenya's public debt had reached approximately 10 trillion shillings, or about 70 percent of GDP. The country...
In the aftermath of the 2024 Gen Z protests that had brought down the finance bill and cost lives, President William...
In June 2024, a finance bill that proposed new taxes on cooking oil, bread and other basic goods triggered protests...