General facts about Kenya

Lying on the equator, with the glaciated peaks of Mount Kenya - second highest mountain in Africa - rsing from a natural environment of exceptional beauty, Kenya is a hugely rewarding place to travel. Revered by many anthropologists as the 'cradle of humanity', Kenya is wild and challenging. The country's dramatically diverse geography has resulted in a great range of natural habitats, while its history of migration and conquest has brought about a complex social panorama.

At 582.000 km² Kenya is about 2,5 times the size of Britain. The population, which, for many years had a growth rate faster than any other country in the world, is now at approx. 30 million, but the rate of increase has at last begun to slow.

History

The Portuguese were the first Europeans to come to Kenya. There followed a period of Portuguese rule centered mainly on the coastal strip ranging from Malindi to Mombasa. The Portuguese colonial presence in East Africa served two primary purposes: the extraction of tribute from coastal polities and the control of trade within the Indian Ocean through piracy. The Omani Arabs posed the most direct challenge to Portuguese influence in East Africa and besieged Portuguese fortresses, openly attacked naval vessels and completely expelled the Portuguese from the Kenyan and Tanzanian coasts by 1730.

Omani Arab colonization of the Kenyan and Tanzanian coasts brought the once independent city-states under closer foreign domination than was experienced during the Portuguese period. The Omani Arabs were also primarily able only to control the coastal areas, but not the interior of Kenya and Tanzania.

Arab governance of all the major ports along the East African coast continued until the British, aimed particularly at ending the slave trade and creation of a wage-labor system, began to put pressure on the Omanis. By the late nineteenth century, the slave trade on the open seas had been completely outlawed by the British and the Omani Arabs had little ability to resist the British navy’s strength. The Omani Arab legacy in East Africa is currently found through their numerous descendants along the coast, directly trace ancestry to Oman and are typically the wealthiest and most politically influential members of the Kenyan coastal community.

Kenya regained independance in 1963, after nealy 80 years of British occupation and colonial rule. The interior central highlands were settled by British and other European farmers, who became wealthy farming coffee and tea. Although the Republic is a multi-party democrazy, the opposition is harmstrung by internal divisions and by the ruthless power hunger of the ruling party.

People and culture

Kenyan society consists of a huge, impoverished underclass, a small, but growing middleclass and a tiny, rich elite class whose success often owesmuch to nepotism and graft. Corruption percolates every corner of the country and most official transactions.

Kenya is made up of more than 70 or so tribal groups. There are also small but influential minorities of Asian, Arab and European origin. More than 90% of the African population falls within the broad categories of Bantu and Nilotic speakers. The main Bantu speakers are Kikuyu, Luhya, Kamba, Gusii, Mijikenda, Embu and Meru. Nilitoc speakers are Maasai, Samburu, Pokot, Turkana, Luo and Kalenjin. At the coast, the interaction of Arabs, Persians and Bantu Africans has resulted in the Swahili people. The Swahili language is now widely spoken in Kenya and throughout Eastern and Central Africa. It is quite useful to have a working knowledge of Swahili if you intend to travel outside the main urban and tourist routes. English is widely understood in urban centers.

The vast majority of the population live in the rugged highland aereas in the southwest of the country, where the ridges are a mix of shamba smallholdings and plantations. Running through the heart of these highland sprawls the Great Rift Valley, an archetypal East African scene of dry, thorn tree savannah, splashed with alkaline lakes and studded by volcanoes.

Most Kenyans scrape a living by subsistence agriculture, and with no oil or natural gas and only few mineral resources, most of the foreign currency needed for vital imports is earned from coffe and tea and exports, and from tourism.

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