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Introduction In late September 2013, four militants associated with the Somali insurgent group al Shabaab walked into an upmarket shopping centre in Nairobi. Armed with automatic weapons and grenades, the gunmen made their way through Westgate Mall firing on those trapped inside. They claimed that their actions were retribution for Kenya's military operations in Somalia and the recent assassinations of Kenyan Muslim clerics. The attackers would kill more than sixty people at the mall, including the nephew of Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta
It was the combined effect of these factors – the problem of cost, the limitations of care and the widely-held belief in the harmful effects of the tropical climate – that led authorities to envisage the transfer of mentally ill Europeans out of Kenya as the only viable solution to the problem of the European insane. Legislation passed in 1918 allowed for the removal of European ‘lunatics’ to South
14 1 The unburied victims of Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion: where and when does the violence end? David M. Anderson and Paul J. Lane All over central Kenya, the bones are coming up. Travelling around the countryside of the Kikuyu-speaking areas of these intensely farmed and closely settled fertile highlands, there are strange patches of uncultivated land to be seen: places where local farmers have found the remains of their kith and kin, those who were killed during Kenya’s bloody rebellion against colonialism in the 1950s. At Othaya, where the bitter war raged
. A tradition of Royal Navy recruitment was thus already embedded in East Africa and from 1919 this would be supplemented by an officer class. The 1926 census revealed that not one of the country’s white population over twenty-six had been born there. African unrest following the First World War made Kenya’s European community fearful of their minority position. They thus
In January 1931, Dr H. L. Gordon, President of the Kenya branch of the British Medical Association, made a speech at the organisation’s Annual Dinner which was a powerful plea for the use of eugenics in colonial development policy. He argued that the promotion of education and physical health in Africa were potentially irresponsible objectives if undertaken without due regard
‘to create new opportunities for financing the colonial state’. 3 In its Kenya colony, a tax system was established to generate local contributions to the costs of British colonial governance. Since the focus was on meeting colonial expenditure needs, minimal amounts were put towards local public services. 4 This marked the narrative that would resonate for years to come on the disconnect between the tax system and its usefulness for establishing a welfare colonial state. One of the fundamental
The politics of African nationalism in Kenya is a topic that has not lacked for scholarly attention. Alongside the many contemporary, or near contemporary studies, of the Mau Mau rebellion and the political process of the transfer of powers which followed its suppression, a spate of recent literature has excavated new sources, re-examined old arguments and presented new
In December 2018, the government of Kenya sought to amend several pieces of legislation using The Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Act, 2018 (No. 18 of 2018). Among the statutes targeted was the Registration of Persons Act (Cap 107 of the Laws of Kenya). These amendments, which came into operation in January 2019, introduced the National
Despite a concerted international effort in recent decades that has yielded significant progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS, the disease continues to kill large numbers of people, especially in certain regions like rural Ndhiwa district in Homa Bay County, Kenya. Although there is still no definitive cure or vaccine, UNAIDS has set an ambitious goal of ending the epidemic by 2030, specifically via its 90-90-90 (treatment cascade) strategy – namely that 90 per cent of
The subject of law and order looms larger in the history of Kenya than in that of any other British colonial possession in Africa. This fact arises not merely from the ‘Mau Mau’ Emergency of the 1950s, which drew direct attention to the problems of social control and the methods of law enforcement employed and condoned by the state; even from the early years of the century