In 1907, the British colonial administration moved its headquarters from Mombasa to Nairobi. It was a practical decision: Nairobi was more centrally located and had a better climate for European settlers. What it meant in practice was that the political centre of Kenya shifted from the cosmopolitan, thousand-year-old port city on the coast to a town that was barely eight years old. The decision shaped everything that followed: where power resided, where infrastructure was built, which communities had access to colonial resources and which did not.