Kenya’s name began as a Kamba word for a snowy mountain
East Africa’s Kenya holds more than 54.2 million people, ranking about twenty-sixth worldwide. German missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf wrote Kenia and Kegnia in the nineteenth century after Kamba guides named the shining mountain that now titles the republic.
Nairobi is the capital and largest city, with Mombasa, Kisumu, Nakuru, and Eldoret among the other hubs. The presidential republic has East and Central Africa’s largest economy and belongs to the UN, Commonwealth, IMF, WTO, and COMESA. Fossils from Koobi Fora and elsewhere place Homo habilis and Homo erectus here, and Joseph Thomson’s 1882 map recorded the mountain name that Krapf had heard.
The first inhabitants were hunter-gatherers akin to today’s Khoisan speakers, joined by Southern Nilotic forest peoples such as the Ogiek in the highlands. Nilotic herders arrived from the Nile Valley and Ethiopian Highlands from about 2000 BC, first the ancestors of the Kalenjin and later the Eastern and Western Nilotes, whose descendants include the Luo, Maasai, Turkana, and Samburu. Bantu farmers from the Benue River region of Nigeria and Cameroon reached the coast by the first millennium AD, bringing ironworking.
Interior sites include Namoratunga west of Lake Turkana, possibly an ancient astronomical site, and the stone-walled settlement of Thimlich Ohinga in Migori County. On the coast, ironworking and fishing communities formed the city-states known as Azania, and from the first century CE ports such as Mombasa and Malindi traded with Arabia, adopting Islam. An inscription in a Lamu mosque dated 1370 or 1371 is among the earliest local written records.
The Kilwa Sultanate, based in present-day Tanzania, once ruled the whole Swahili coast and minted copper coins. Swahili, a Bantu language rich in Arabic and Persian loanwords, became the lingua franca of trade. Duarte Barbosa described Mombasa as a busy harbour, Zheng He’s fleet visited Malindi in 1414, and in the seventeenth century Omani Arabs conquered the coast and expanded the slave trade to supply plantations in Oman and Zanzibar.
Source: Kenya
