History+of+Africa

DeprezV

[ag_of_Kenya.svg/800px-Flag_of_Kenya.svg.png |Source]


 * History of Kenya**

Kenya is a country in eastern Africa that is located between Somalia and Tanzania. Kenya is bordered by the Indian Ocean on its eastern side.

[|Source]

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Kenya became a British colony. In the late 1800s, the British started protecting Kenya, but they also were partially controlling it. Kenya did not become an actual Crown colony until 1920. Kenya started going by the name “British East Africa”. Later, in the 1940s, there started to be signs of a nationalist movement. People in Kenya were starting to want independence. It took several years before there were actually any independence movements, however. It wasn’t until 1952 that an independence movement occurred. This independence movement was called the Mau Mau movement, and it was made up of Kikuyu militants who started to rebel against the British government. This rebellion lasted until 1956. Kenya did not gain full independence until December 12, 1963. The first president of the country was Jomo Kenyatta, who had been a nationalist leader during the independence movement and had been put in jail by the British during that time. From the time when Jomo Kenyatta was in office up until 1992, Kenya was a one-party state, ruled by the Kenya African National Union (KANU). After Jomo Kenyatta’s term in office, Daniel arap Moi ruled the country. The people of Kenya started o grow restless during his term in office. They wanted multi-party elections, and the people of Kenya held demonstrations and rioted to pressure Moi to let them have multi-party elections during the next election in 1992. When Moi was president, the economy in Kenya was bad, and because of this, during the 1990s many countries refused to give Kenya financial aid. The demonstrations and riots were still going on, so in 1995, Moi tried to stop the people who were opposing him by ordering that anyone who insulted him was to be thrown in jail. Later, in 1997 and 1998, there was a series of disasters in Kenya. There was severe flooding, epidemics of malaria and cholera, and ethnic fights between the Kikuyu and Kalenjin people in the Rift Valley. The flooding destroyed Kenya’s roads, bridges, and crops, and the epidemics of malaria and cholera overwhelmed Kenya’s health care system. Finally, on August 7th, 1998, the United States embassy located in Nairobi Kenya was bombed by terrorists. 243 were killed and over a thousand people were injured in the bombing. In 1999, President Moi appointed his critic and political opponent, a man named Richard Leakey, as head of civil service in Kenya in order to try to regain financial aid from those who had refused Kenya loans because of its terrible economy. His plan worked; Kenya had its funding back. Richard Leakey started off well in this office, but President Moi fired him 20 months later. At the start of the new millennium, Kenya suffered from a devastating drought. In August 2000, United Nations aid workers went to help Kenya. They estimated that 3.3 million Kenyan people were at risk of starvation during the drought. In 2001, the Kenyan parliament tried to pass an anti-corruption law in order to try to avoid the corruption that had kept other countries from wanting to help Kenya in the past. However, many people thought the law was too full of loopholes and that would never help, and so the law was never passed. In the year 2002, Kenya was due for another election. In this election, Mwai Kibaki, who was an opposition leader won the election. President Kibaki promised to end the corruption that had been in Kenya so long and took action to do so during his first few months in office. He started several reforms to try to help Kenya, including cracking down on corrupt judges and police and starting free primary education for the children of Kenya. The other countries who had not wanted to help Kenya in the past started to see that Kenya was making an effort to turn itself around and began helping Kenya again. But a few years into Kibaki’s term, Kenya stopped making progress. People became disappointed in him. They were also disappointed because they had been told for a long time that a new constitution that limited the president’s power would soon be written and put into effect, and this still had not happened. One thing that made it really obvious that President Kibaki wasn’t making progress on the corruption issue was the resignation of his anticorruption minister, who resigned because he was tired of being prevented from investigating scandals in the country. In 2005, parliament finally passed a draft of Kenya’s new constitution, but voters didn’t like it because it expanded the president’s power instead of limiting it. In the coming years, yet another severe drought caught hold of Kenya. This time, by January of 2006, 2.5 million Kenyan people were suffering from starvation due to the lack of crops and farm animals the drought caused. In 2007, Kenya had another election, and Kibaki was re-elected. There was chaos and violence in Kenya after the election. The violence was between the Luo and Kikuyu tribes because these were the tribes that the two candidates had come from. People believed that the election was rigged because they thought that too many voters had been too unhappy with Kibaki for him to have been honestly re-elected. Also, preliminary poll results had shown that Kibaki’s opponent, Raila Odinga, had had a substantial lead. Odinga had also promised to get rid of the tribalism and corruption in Kenya and helped poor people. It seemed that voters would surely elect him because of the fact that he wanted to help improve Kenya and he had helped the Kenyan people in the past. This violence continued into 2008. By January, over 800 Kenyan people had died in the violence. Odinga had offered to talk with Kibaki in order to try to end the violence, but Kibaki refused. He instead deployed the military, but they couldn’t stop the ethnic fighting either. During this time, a member of Parliament named Mugabe Were who had tried to help end the ethnic conflict and help the poor, was dragged from his car and shot. Many members of the opposing party to Kibaki said that it had been a political assassination, since Were was from the same political party they were. By the time of February of 2008, over 1,000 people had died from this ethnic violence. Around this time, the former secretary general of the UN, Kofi Annan, met with representatives of the Kenyan government to try to help to help resolve the crisis of the ethnic violence in Kenya. ("Kenya")

Works Cited: "Kenya." Information Please. 2007. Information Please. 21 Feb 2008 .