31 stories spanning millions of years of Kenyan history.
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...
They called it the Lunatic Express. A railway from Mombasa to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, 900 kilometres through desert,...
On 1 July 1895, the British government formally declared the East Africa Protectorate, taking over from the bankrupt...
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...
They called themselves the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. The British called them Mau Mau. They were primarily Kikuyu...
The Mau Mau movement was not held together by an army command structure. It was held together by oaths. Administered in...
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...