Kenya

From the cradle of humankind on Lake Turkana to the Swahili coast and a modern East African republic.

Kenya holds one of the richest records of human origins on earth, its Turkana basin yielding hominin fossils spanning millions of years, including the near-complete Homo erectus skeleton known as Turkana Boy. Over later millennia Bantu and Nilotic peoples settled its highlands and lakes, while a string of Swahili city-states — Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu and Gede — grew rich on Indian Ocean trade and gave rise to the Swahili language and an Afro-Islamic coastal culture. The Portuguese seized the coast in the sixteenth century and built Fort Jesus, only to be expelled by Omani Arabs in 1698, after which the coast fell under the orbit of the sultanate of Zanzibar. From 1895 Britain ruled the interior as the East Africa Protectorate, drove the Uganda Railway inland, and settled the fertile highlands, dispossessions that fed the Mau Mau uprising of 1952–60. Kenya won independence on 12 December 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta and, after decades of one-party rule under Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, returned to multiparty politics in 1991, endured the 2007–08 post-election violence, and adopted a new devolved constitution in 2010.