Kenya

The colony where white settlement went furthest in East Africa, and where the response to it was met with a system of camps Britain spent fifty years not discussing. The Swahili coast had been a trading world linked to Arabia and India for a thousand years before the interior mattered to anyone outside it. Britain built the Uganda Railway from Mombasa in the 1890s using indentured Indian labour, and to make it pay encouraged European settlement in the fertile highlands, which were closed to African ownership - the White Highlands - while Kikuyu families were pushed into reserves and onto settler farms as squatters. The Mau Mau revolt from 1952 was answered with a state of emergency, mass detention of perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand people, and systematic torture; Britain paid compensation to surviving detainees in 2013 after documents it had concealed were found. Independence came in 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta. One-party rule under Daniel arap Moi lasted until 2002, and disputed elections in 2007 produced violence that killed over a thousand. Nairobi is a regional hub for business and aid. M-Pesa made Kenya an early leader in mobile money. Tea and horticulture are the main exports. The country has about fifty-five million people and over forty ethnic groups. Swahili and English are both official. The Great Rift Valley runs through it, and fossils from Turkana are among the most important in human evolution. Kenyan distance runners from the Rift highlands have dominated their events for decades. Nairobi has a national park within the city limits.

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