Kenya sits in East Africa, and is surrounded by Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Uganda, Tanzania and the Red Sea. It is about the same size as France and just a smidge smaller than Texas. About 36 million people live in Kenya, compared to 60 million in France and 20 million in Texas. These 36 million Kenyans make up a phenomenally diverse group of people; according to the American government, the ethnic groups living in the country include: Kikuyu 22%, Luhya 14%, Luo 13%, Kalenjin 12%, Kamba 11%, Kisii 6%, Meru 6%, other African 15%, and non-African (Asian, European, and Arab) 1%.

People (or their very close ancestors) have been living in Kenya for a little over 2.5 million years. For our purposes, the relevant history begins around 2000 years ago, after the East Coast of Africa had established itself as a significant hub for Arabian and Persian traders. The Portuguese arrived in the 16th century and the British in the 19th.

When the British arrived, they did what colonial powers did in those days: built a railroad. Much of colonial expansion seems driven by the idea of adding large-scale infrastructure across "hostile" lands and then figuring out what to do with it, rather than the other way around. Kenya's railroad was no exception. Unlike other colonial areas of Africa (namely South Africa), Kenya didn't have vast stores of mineral wealth to dig up and ship out, so the only way to make the railroad profitable was to increase agricultural production in the Kenyan interior.

The railroad connecting Lake Victoria to Mombasa at the coast went in during the first decades of the 1900s, but by the time the British East Africa Company figured out that agriculture was the key to profitability, it was the 1930s. Not a good time to try and make anything profitable.

During its construction of the railroad, the Colonial government had set up "reserves" for native East Africans (largely Kikuyu and Maasai) to live in. As its focused turned increasingly toward agriculture, the British East Africa Company needed more and more land to drive production. Throughout the 30s, its desire for land remained sluggish, as a global economic depression kept grain prices low. But after World War II, increased demand for cereal grains coming from the Kenyan highlands pushed prices up considerably.

Expansion of British land (and the resulting contraction of native reserves) quickly accelerated. Increasingly crowded conditions on the reserves forced many Kikuyu to seek work as tenant farmers on colonial farms. By the 1950s, almost half of the Kikuyu people living in Kenya had no claims to land of their own. That makes life very difficult in an agriculturally-based society. Combined with the return of some 75,000 Kenyan soldiers who had fought alongside British troops in World War II, the movement of native Kenyans onto white farms provided a vehicle for increased political organization and an understanding of what that organization might achieve.

As with any social movement, the roots of the movement for Kenyan independence are deep and complex, with the Kikuyu starting to organize in the 1920s. During the increased activity that occurred in the 1940s, the colonial government made efforts to associate the movement with a handful of leaders, including future president Jomo Kenyatta. They imprisoned Kenyatta, but were unable to slow the movement for independence, which evolved into the Mau Mau Uprising in the early 1950s.

Kenya became independent from colonial rule in 1963. That's 1963. Jomo Kenyatta became president and ruled what was effectively a one-party state until his death in 1978. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi made it official in 1982, leaving his Kenya African National Union the sole political entity in the country. In 1991, Moi re-opened the political system to additional parties, which were unable to defeat Moi's KANU in 1992's and 1997's flawed and violent elections. In 2002, a former government economist named Mwai Kibaki won the Presidential election for the National Rainbow Coalition on an anti-corruption platform, marking the first-ever win for an opposition party.

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Kibaki's government doesn't seem to be making much progress in its attempts to curb corruption. On a recent visit to Nairobi, Senator Barak Obama denounced still-common practices of ethnic-bloc voting and patronage hiring in the Kenyan government. Further, Kibaki's government continues to struggle with the fallout of colonial land-use history.

However, the media in Kenya remains, in general, a genuine and independent voice. They are well aware of the reasons for Obama's allegations and are not afraid to state them.



Tune in next week, as we discuss youth unemployment and offer up a little government criticism of our own.

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