World Country Guide

History and Government

History
Excavations in Kenya suggest that the region is the cradle of humanity, the home some 3.25 million years ago of Homo habilis, from whom Homo sapiens descended. What is certain is that, in more recent times, Kenya was the settling place of a huge number of tribes from all over Africa, with a long history of migration, settlement and conflict. During the following centuries, the region became prosperous on the profits of trade, and also as an entrepôt for commerce from the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese arrived in the early 16th century, and having wrested control of the area’s trade from the Arabs, absorbed Kenya into their commercial empire.

By 1720 they had been driven out by the Arabs, and for the next two centuries the region was largely ruled by Omani Dynasties from Arabia. During the 1820s, a local power struggle led to the British being invited into the region by the Mazrui Dynasty, and, by the middle of the century, both the British and the Germans were competing for control of the coast and its hinterland during the second great colonial period. By the 1890s the threat of the Masai tribesmen had, by a mixture of diplomacy and war, largely been neutralised, and the British were able to penetrate into the highlands. The Mombasa to Uganda railway line was constructed at this time, and Nairobi owes its present importance to the fact that it was a convenient staging point on the edge of the highlands. It soon became the headquarters of the British administration.

By the early 20th century, the fertile lands to the north were attracting a large number of white settlers led by Lord Delamere who came into conflict with the local population. Many tribes, such as the Masai and the Kikuyu, were displaced. The movement for territorial, economic and political rights soon found an able leader in Jomo Kenyatta, who spent much of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe pressing the case for his cause. After World War II, this gathered pace. The fight for independence was a difficult and sometimes bloody affair, particularly the three-year guerrilla war mounted during the 1950s by the nationalist Land Freedom Army (better known as the Mau Mau) against the British colonial authorities.

Kenya was nonetheless an early beneficiary of Harold Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ policy towards Africa. The main nationalist party, the Kenyan African National Union (KANU), led by Kenyatta, took power on Independence Day in December 1963, despite British efforts to sponsor an alternative. Kenyan politics were subsequently dominated by the struggle between moderate and radical factions within the ruling KANU party. The moderates, led by Tom Mboya (assassinated in 1969) and Kenyatta’s eventual successor, Daniel Arap Moi, consistently held the upper hand. Opposition parties were banned outright in 1982 after an attempted coup which showed signs of having been contrived by the government in order to justify the ban.

During the early 1990s, under pressure from Western aid donors, the Moi government was finally forced to concede to a multi-party democracy. The main opposition movement was now the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy (FORD). This posed a major threat to Moi’s hold on power until it suffered an irrevocable and, ultimately, fatal split. Kenyan politics is often based on tribal allegiance: FORD drew support from the two largest but often mutually antagonistic tribes, the Kikuyu and the Luo, while Moi belonged to the smaller Kalenjin tribe. With the main opposition party divided, KANU and Moi won the December 1992 legislative and presidential elections.

It was the government’s ferocious reaction to Safina, a relatively small and short-lived political party set up by the renowned anthropologist Richard Leakey, that prompted the suspension of some Western aid. Efforts to restore the flow foundered on the Moi regime’s increasingly poor record in tackling official corruption. With a rapidly growing external debt, Kenya was now in serious financial difficulties. At the next national election in December 1997, amid widespread allegations of fraud, malpractice and pre-election violence orchestrated by pro-government elements, both Moi and KANU recorded slight improvements on their performances of five years earlier. Moi’s main opponent on this occasion was a former vice-president, Mwai Kibaki. With Moi constitutionally barred from contesting the December 2002 election, Mwai Kibaki – the most prominent opposition politician – made his second attempt at the presidency (this time against a new KANU candidate: Jomo Kenyatta’s son, Uhuru, who is new to politics) and was elected President.

Government
Kenya’s legislature is the single chamber 224-member National Assembly: 210 members are directly elected every five years in single-seat constituencies; 12 members are appointed; the Speaker and the Attorney-General serve in an ex-officio capacity. Executive power is held by the president who is also directly elected for five years.