Kenya history
Prehistory
Some 4 million years ago, the world's earliest links to modern mankind-Australopithecus anamensis and Homo habilis-live around northern Kenya's Lake Turkana (bones discovered in 1972 and 1995). Around 50,000 BC, Stone Age man starts using fire. Hunters migrating from southwest Asia and northern Africa bring stone arrowheads, knifeblades and ornamental beads made from seeds and ostrich eggshell.
2nd century AD
A Greek merchant from Roman Egypt explores the ivory and spice trade down the Indian Ocean coast to the port of what is now Mombasa.
15th-18th centuries
Vasco da Gama arrives in Malindi in 1498, heralding the Portuguese invasion of the coast, which takes Mombasa as the colonial capital in 1592. The Portuguese resist Turkish and Omani Arab assaults for 200 years, ruling through the Swahili sheikh as intermediary. Omani Arabs gradually take over after driving the Portuguese from Mombasa in 1729. The interior is inhabited by Luo herders and farmers in the west, Masai herders in the south-central plains, Nandi in the hill country, and Kikuyu between Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya.
20th century
White settlers are brought in from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Canada to join those from Britain, dispossessing the Masai on the fertile White Highlands. In 1907, Nairobi replaces Mombasa as capital, Kenya is declared a Crown Colony 1920.Christian missionary education plus experience as soldiers in two World Wars prepare Kenya's future African revolutionaries. After 16 years as teacher and political activist in England, Jomo Kenyatta leads the militant Kenya African Union in 1947 till its ban in 1952. His Mau Mau guerrilla warriors fight British troops in the mountains and forests till the period known as the Emergency ends in 1960. Casualties number 13,000 Africans, less than 100 whites. Kenyatta is released from jail in exile to lead his country to independence in 1963.The new nation's tribal conflicts re-emerge under Kenyatta's 1978 successor, authoritarian Daniel Arap Moi. The ruling Kenya African National Union party resists the 1995-96 campaign by opposition parties for a more democratic constitution.
