Kenya’s 2007/08 Post-Election Violence In the days between Christmas 2007 and the end of February 2008, Kenya burned. Streets that had been busy with holiday shoppers became battlegrounds. Neighbourhoods where Kikuyu, Luo, Kalenjin and Luhya families had lived side by side for decades turned into killing grounds defined by ethnicity. Churches became refuges — and … Read more
On 22 August 1978, a schoolteacher’s son from the Tugen hills of Baringo took the oath of office as Kenya’s second president. The man who had spent eleven years as vice president — mocked by the Kikuyu elite as “a passing cloud,” dismissed as a political placeholder incapable of independent leadership — would go on … Read more
On 1 August 1982, junior officers of the Kenya Air Force seized the Voice of Kenya radio station and announced the end of the Moi government. For a few electric hours, the country’s fate hung in the balance. Forty years on, we revisit the causes, the chaos, and the long shadow it cast. Before the … Read more
Along the shores of Lake Victoria in western Kenya, in the low-lying plains and hillsides of Busia County, there is a community of Plains Nilotes who have been growing cotton, sorghum, and finger millet for generations. They call themselves the Iteso — the people of Teso — and they are related, distantly but linguistically, to the Maasai, … Read more
The highlands of southwestern Kenya, where the land rises steeply from the Lake Victoria basin and the annual rainfall exceeds 200 centimetres, are among the most densely populated rural landscapes on the continent. Every ridge is farmed. Every valley floor is planted. The banana groves are so dense and so productive that Kisii bananas have … Read more
In the far northwest of Kenya, where the land drops away from the highlands into a vast semi-arid basin and the air shimmers with heat for most of the year, there is a lake that should not exist. Lake Turkana — 290 kilometres long, sitting in the middle of one of the driest landscapes on … Read more
Forty-two kilometres northeast of Nairobi, at the point where the Thika and Chania rivers meet and the plateau begins to drop away toward the eastern plains, there is a town that does not look like a place with much of a story to tell. Its streets are busy rather than beautiful. Its skyline is chimneys … Read more
There is a town in western Kenya whose official name exists because of a typing error. In January 1912, when a gazette notice was published giving the young settlement on the Uasin Gishu plateau its formal name, a clerk misspelled Eldaret as Eldoret. Nobody corrected it. The name stuck. And in that small act of … Read more
Organization, Tactics, and Warfare in the Nineteenth Century The Maasai of East Africa have long occupied a singular place in the historical imagination as the quintessential warrior people of the region. During the nineteenth century their reputation for martial prowess extended from the Indian Ocean coast to the great lakes, and they were widely regarded … Read more
The Kalenjin People — kenyanhistory.com Peoples of Kenya Pre-colonial History Rift Valley March 27, 2026 From the Nile Valley to the Rift Valley highlands — the origins, governance, resistance, politics, and world-record running of Kenya’s fourth-largest ethnic group. By Kenyan History Team · 8,000 words · 35 min read Kenya’s fourth-largest ethnic group, the Kalenjin … Read more