The only capital with a national park inside city limits
Nairobi, Kenya’s capital and largest city, is home to about 5.6 million people and is the only capital in the world with a national park inside its boundaries. Its name comes from a Maasai phrase for a place of cool waters, after a cold stream that once ran through the swampy site.
Before the railway, the land was swamp shared by Maasai herders, Akamba long-distance traders and Kikuyu farmers. Sir George Whitehouse, chief engineer of the Uganda Railway, picked it in 1898 as a depot, shunting yard and camp for Indian labourers, liking its altitude, mild climate and water and its position just before the steep climb up the Limuru escarpment. Critics in the protectorate called it flat, badly drained and infertile. Arthur Church drew the first plan of two streets and ten avenues, and the line reached the depot on 30 May 1899.
Early years were rough: malaria prompted at least one proposal to move the town, and after plague broke out the original bazaar was burned and rebuilt. Still, the population rose from about 5,000 in 1902 to 16,000 by 1910, fed by administration and big-game hunting, and in 1907 Nairobi replaced Mombasa as capital of the East Africa Protectorate. By 1921 it had 24,000 residents, roughly half of them Africans, and colonial expansion after the Second World War angered the Maasai and Kikuyu, feeding the Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s.
Kenya became independent in 1963 with Nairobi as its capital, and the city grew around coffee, tea and sisal. The 28-storey Kenyatta International Conference Centre opened in 1973, and in August 1998 al-Qaeda bombed the United States Embassy downtown, now a memorial park. Recent projects include the Thika Superhighway, the Chinese-built Standard Gauge Railway to Mombasa, opened in 2017, and the Nairobi Expressway of 2022.
Today Nairobi hosts Kenya’s Parliament, State House and Supreme Court, the UN Environment Programme and one of Africa’s oldest stock exchanges. It lies near the eastern edge of the Rift Valley, with the Ngong Hills to the west.
Source: Nairobi
