History of Nairobi
Encyclopedia
The earliest account of Nairobi
's (icon) history dates back to 1899 when a railway depot was built in a brackish African
swamp
occupied only by a nomadic people
, the Maasai, as well as the pastoral Kikuyu people who were displaced. The railway complex and the building around it rapidly expanded and urbanized until it became the largest city of Kenya
and the country's capital
. The name "Nairobi" comes from the Maasai
phrase Enkare Nyorobi, which translates to "the place of cool waters". However, Nairobi is popularly known as the "Green City in the Sun."
land occupied by the city now was once inhabited by the herding
people, the Maasai, under the British East Africa protectorate when the British
decided to build a railroad from Mombasa
to Kisumu
on the edge of Lake Victoria
in order to open East Africa
and make it accessible for trade
and encourage colonial
settlements. The Maasai were forcibly removed to allow land for white ranchers.
In 1896, work on the railway began. A British railroad camp and supply depot
for the Uganda Railway
was built in the Maasai area in 1899. The building soon became the railway's headquarters and a town grew up surrounding it, named after a watering hole known in Maasai
as Ewaso Nyirobi, meaning "cool waters." The location of the Nairobi railway camp was chosen due to its central position between Mombasa
and Kampala
, as well as its proximity to a network of rivers that could supply the camp with water. Its elevation made it cool enough for comfortable residential living. Furthermore, at 1661 meters above the sea level, the temperatures are too low for the mosquitoes carrying malaria
to survive.
The town was totally rebuilt in the early 1900s after an outbreak of plague
and the subsequent burning down of the original town.
By 1907, Nairobi was a humming commercial center and replaced Mombasa
as capital of the British East Africa. The city expanded, supported by the growth in administrative
functions and in tourism
, initially in the form of British big game hunting
. As the British colonialists explored the region, they began using Nairobi as their first stop. This prompted the colonial government to build several grand hotel
s in the city for British tourists and big game hunters.
Nairobi continued to grow under British rule, and many Britons settled within the city's suburbs. The continuous expansion of the city began to anger the Maasai, as the city was devouring their land to the south as well as the Kikuyu people felt the land belonged to them. In 1919, Nairobi was declared to be a municipality
by the British.
In February 1926, E.A.T. Dutton passed through Nairobi on his way to Mount Kenya
and, seeing the progress and the ambitious plans the city was making, foresaw a city of paved roads, landscaped avenues and parks, impressive cathedrals, museums, art galleries, theatres and office buildings. He predicted that Nairobi would become a city of beauty, although he noted that much needed to be accomplished before the ambitious municipal plan was completed and until then Nairobi would remain "a slatternly creature, unfit to queen it over so lovely a country".
were forced to carry identification cards. In 1921 Harry Thuku
founded the Young Kikuyu Association
and began organizing protests as people became more open about their grievances against the British. On March 14, 1922 he was arrested. His arrest caused a general strike in Nairobi in which thousands of Africans protested and the British government reacted by shooting 56 protesters, 25 of whom died, the massacre shocking people worldwide, even the British. Although Thuku was exiled to a remote desert oasis, this was only the beginning of unrest that continued with escalating severity.
After the end of World War II
, the friction developed into the Mau Mau Uprising
. Jomo Kenyatta
, Kenya's future president, joined the Kikuyu Central Association
after moving to the urban Nairobi from a small village, becoming its general secretary in three years, a step that lead to his becoming Kenya's first prime minister and then Kenya's first president. Pressure exerted from the local people on the British resulted in Kenyan independence in 1963, with Nairobi as the capital of the new republic.
Because the area around Nairobi continued to be a popular attraction for British big game hunters, the Nairobi National Park
was established by Britain in 1946, the first national park in East Africa. It remains unique in 2008 in that it is the only game reserve bordering on a capital city in the world.
After independence, Nairobi grew rapidly and this growth put pressure on the city's infrastructure. Power cuts and water shortages were a common occurrence, though in the past few years better city planning has helped to put some of these problems in check.
In 1975 Nairobi was the host city of the 5th Assembly of the World Council of Churches
.
The U.S.
embassy in the heart of Nairobi was bombed on August 7, 1998 by Al-Qaida, as one of a series of U.S. embassy bombings. Over two hundred civilians were killed in the embassy and another 213 persons in the surrounding area with more than 5,000 people injured. The effects were widespread and devastating. The embassy was completely destroyed and another forty buildings severely damaged. A seven-story building collapsed killing at least 60 people.
The growth of Nairobi has put pressure on the government to develop and maintain protected lands such as the Nairobi National Park
. The new residential areas for the growing human population are making inroads into lands that have been traditionally the migration routes for huge animal herds.
Following the disputed Kenyan presidential election, 2007
, serious violence broke out in Nairobi. In the Mathare
slum, Luo gangs burned more than 100 homes.
Nairobi
Nairobi is the capital and largest city of Kenya. The city and its surrounding area also forms the Nairobi County. The name "Nairobi" comes from the Maasai phrase Enkare Nyirobi, which translates to "the place of cool waters". However, it is popularly known as the "Green City in the Sun" and is...
's (icon) history dates back to 1899 when a railway depot was built in a brackish African
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
swamp
Swamp
A swamp is a wetland with some flooding of large areas of land by shallow bodies of water. A swamp generally has a large number of hammocks, or dry-land protrusions, covered by aquatic vegetation, or vegetation that tolerates periodical inundation. The two main types of swamp are "true" or swamp...
occupied only by a nomadic people
Nomad
Nomadic people , commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world. Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but...
, the Maasai, as well as the pastoral Kikuyu people who were displaced. The railway complex and the building around it rapidly expanded and urbanized until it became the largest city of Kenya
Kenya
Kenya , officially known as the Republic of Kenya, is a country in East Africa that lies on the equator, with the Indian Ocean to its south-east...
and the country's capital
Capital City
Capital City was a television show produced by Euston Films which focused on the lives of investment bankers in London living and working on the corporate trading floor for the fictional international bank Shane-Longman....
. The name "Nairobi" comes from the Maasai
Maasai language
The Maasai language is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering about 800,000...
phrase Enkare Nyorobi, which translates to "the place of cool waters". However, Nairobi is popularly known as the "Green City in the Sun."
Pre independence
The former swampSwamp
A swamp is a wetland with some flooding of large areas of land by shallow bodies of water. A swamp generally has a large number of hammocks, or dry-land protrusions, covered by aquatic vegetation, or vegetation that tolerates periodical inundation. The two main types of swamp are "true" or swamp...
land occupied by the city now was once inhabited by the herding
Herding
Herding is the act of bringing individual animals together into a group , maintaining the group and moving the group from place to place—or any combination of those. While the layperson uses the term "herding", most individuals involved in the process term it mustering, "working stock" or...
people, the Maasai, under the British East Africa protectorate when the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
decided to build a railroad from Mombasa
Mombasa
Mombasa is the second-largest city in Kenya. Lying next to the Indian Ocean, it has a major port and an international airport. The city also serves as the centre of the coastal tourism industry....
to Kisumu
Kisumu
Kisumu is a port city in western Kenya at , with a population of 355,024 . It is the third largest city in Kenya, the principal city of western Kenya, the immediate former capital of Nyanza Province and the headquarters of Kisumu County. It has a municipal charter but no city charter...
on the edge of Lake Victoria
Lake Victoria
Lake Victoria is one of the African Great Lakes. The lake was named for Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, by John Hanning Speke, the first European to discover this lake....
in order to open East Africa
East Africa
East Africa or Eastern Africa is the easterly region of the African continent, variably defined by geography or geopolitics. In the UN scheme of geographic regions, 19 territories constitute Eastern Africa:...
and make it accessible for trade
Trade
Trade is the transfer of ownership of goods and services from one person or entity to another. Trade is sometimes loosely called commerce or financial transaction or barter. A network that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and...
and encourage colonial
Colonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
settlements. The Maasai were forcibly removed to allow land for white ranchers.
In 1896, work on the railway began. A British railroad camp and supply depot
Distribution center
A distribution center for a set of products is a warehouse or other specialized building, often with refrigeration or air conditioning, which is stocked with products to be redistributed to retailers, to wholesalers, or directly to consumers. A distribution center is a principal part, the order...
for the Uganda Railway
Uganda Railway
The Uganda Railway is a railway system and former railway company linking the interiors of Uganda and Kenya with the Indian Ocean at Mombasa in Kenya.-Origins:...
was built in the Maasai area in 1899. The building soon became the railway's headquarters and a town grew up surrounding it, named after a watering hole known in Maasai
Maasai language
The Maasai language is an Eastern Nilotic language spoken in Southern Kenya and Northern Tanzania by the Maasai people, numbering about 800,000...
as Ewaso Nyirobi, meaning "cool waters." The location of the Nairobi railway camp was chosen due to its central position between Mombasa
Mombasa
Mombasa is the second-largest city in Kenya. Lying next to the Indian Ocean, it has a major port and an international airport. The city also serves as the centre of the coastal tourism industry....
and Kampala
Kampala
Kampala is the largest city and capital of Uganda. The city is divided into five boroughs that oversee local planning: Kampala Central Division, Kawempe Division, Makindye Division, Nakawa Division and Lubaga Division. The city is coterminous with Kampala District.-History: of Buganda, had chosen...
, as well as its proximity to a network of rivers that could supply the camp with water. Its elevation made it cool enough for comfortable residential living. Furthermore, at 1661 meters above the sea level, the temperatures are too low for the mosquitoes carrying malaria
Malaria
Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease of humans and other animals caused by eukaryotic protists of the genus Plasmodium. The disease results from the multiplication of Plasmodium parasites within red blood cells, causing symptoms that typically include fever and headache, in severe cases...
to survive.
The town was totally rebuilt in the early 1900s after an outbreak of plague
Bubonic plague
Plague is a deadly infectious disease that is caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, named after the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Primarily carried by rodents and spread to humans via fleas, the disease is notorious throughout history, due to the unrivaled scale of death...
and the subsequent burning down of the original town.
By 1907, Nairobi was a humming commercial center and replaced Mombasa
Mombasa
Mombasa is the second-largest city in Kenya. Lying next to the Indian Ocean, it has a major port and an international airport. The city also serves as the centre of the coastal tourism industry....
as capital of the British East Africa. The city expanded, supported by the growth in administrative
Public administration
Public Administration houses the implementation of government policy and an academic discipline that studies this implementation and that prepares civil servants for this work. As a "field of inquiry with a diverse scope" its "fundamental goal.....
functions and in tourism
Tourism
Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. The World Tourism Organization defines tourists as people "traveling to and staying in places outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes".Tourism has become a...
, initially in the form of British big game hunting
Big game hunting
Big game hunting is the hunting of large game. The term is historically associated with the hunting of Africa's Big Five game , and with tigers and rhinos on the Indian subcontinent. In North America, animals such as bears and bison were hunted...
. As the British colonialists explored the region, they began using Nairobi as their first stop. This prompted the colonial government to build several grand hotel
Hotel
A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. The provision of basic accommodation, in times past, consisting only of a room with a bed, a cupboard, a small table and a washstand has largely been replaced by rooms with modern facilities, including en-suite bathrooms...
s in the city for British tourists and big game hunters.
Nairobi continued to grow under British rule, and many Britons settled within the city's suburbs. The continuous expansion of the city began to anger the Maasai, as the city was devouring their land to the south as well as the Kikuyu people felt the land belonged to them. In 1919, Nairobi was declared to be a municipality
Municipality
A municipality is essentially an urban administrative division having corporate status and usually powers of self-government. It can also be used to mean the governing body of a municipality. A municipality is a general-purpose administrative subdivision, as opposed to a special-purpose district...
by the British.
In February 1926, E.A.T. Dutton passed through Nairobi on his way to Mount Kenya
Mount Kenya
Mount Kenya is the highest mountain in Kenya and the second-highest in Africa, after Kilimanjaro. The highest peaks of the mountain are Batian , Nelion and Point Lenana . Mount Kenya is located in central Kenya, just south of the equator, around north-northeast of the capital Nairobi...
and, seeing the progress and the ambitious plans the city was making, foresaw a city of paved roads, landscaped avenues and parks, impressive cathedrals, museums, art galleries, theatres and office buildings. He predicted that Nairobi would become a city of beauty, although he noted that much needed to be accomplished before the ambitious municipal plan was completed and until then Nairobi would remain "a slatternly creature, unfit to queen it over so lovely a country".
Unrest
In 1915 The British passed laws restricting the ownership of land to whites. Then followed high taxes and low wages. BlacksBlack people
The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...
were forced to carry identification cards. In 1921 Harry Thuku
Harry Thuku
Harry Thuku was born in Kenya into the Kikuyu ethnic group, one of the groups that lost the largest amount of land to white settlers during the British takeover of Kenya....
founded the Young Kikuyu Association
Young Kikuyu Association
The Young Kikuyu Association was formed in Kenya on the 10th June 1921, as a break away organisation from the Kikuyu Association . In July 1921 it was renamed the East Africa Association ....
and began organizing protests as people became more open about their grievances against the British. On March 14, 1922 he was arrested. His arrest caused a general strike in Nairobi in which thousands of Africans protested and the British government reacted by shooting 56 protesters, 25 of whom died, the massacre shocking people worldwide, even the British. Although Thuku was exiled to a remote desert oasis, this was only the beginning of unrest that continued with escalating severity.
After the end of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, the friction developed into the Mau Mau Uprising
Mau Mau Uprising
The Mau Mau Uprising was a military conflict that took place in Kenya between 1952 and 1960...
. Jomo Kenyatta
Jomo Kenyatta
Jomo Kenyattapron.] served as the first Prime Minister and President of Kenya. He is considered the founding father of the Kenyan nation....
, Kenya's future president, joined the Kikuyu Central Association
Kikuyu Central Association
The Kikuyu Central Association , led by James Beauttah and Joseph Kang'ethe, was a political organisation in colonial Kenya formed in 1924/5 to act on behalf of the Kĩkũyũ community by presenting their concerns to the British government. One of its greatest grievances was the expropriation of the...
after moving to the urban Nairobi from a small village, becoming its general secretary in three years, a step that lead to his becoming Kenya's first prime minister and then Kenya's first president. Pressure exerted from the local people on the British resulted in Kenyan independence in 1963, with Nairobi as the capital of the new republic.
Because the area around Nairobi continued to be a popular attraction for British big game hunters, the Nairobi National Park
Nairobi National Park
Nairobi National Park is a national park in Kenya. Established in 1946, the national park was Kenya's first. It is located approximately 7 kilometres south of the centre of Nairobi, Kenya's capital city, with only a fence separating the park's wildlife from the metropolis. Nairobi's skyscrapers...
was established by Britain in 1946, the first national park in East Africa. It remains unique in 2008 in that it is the only game reserve bordering on a capital city in the world.
Post independence
In 1975 Nairobi was the host city of the 5th Assembly of the World Council of Churches
World Council of Churches
The World Council of Churches is a worldwide fellowship of 349 global, regional and sub-regional, national and local churches seeking unity, a common witness and Christian service. It is a Christian ecumenical organization that is based in the Ecumenical Centre in Geneva, Switzerland...
.
The U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
embassy in the heart of Nairobi was bombed on August 7, 1998 by Al-Qaida, as one of a series of U.S. embassy bombings. Over two hundred civilians were killed in the embassy and another 213 persons in the surrounding area with more than 5,000 people injured. The effects were widespread and devastating. The embassy was completely destroyed and another forty buildings severely damaged. A seven-story building collapsed killing at least 60 people.
Nairobi National Park
Nairobi National Park is a national park in Kenya. Established in 1946, the national park was Kenya's first. It is located approximately 7 kilometres south of the centre of Nairobi, Kenya's capital city, with only a fence separating the park's wildlife from the metropolis. Nairobi's skyscrapers...
. The new residential areas for the growing human population are making inroads into lands that have been traditionally the migration routes for huge animal herds.
Following the disputed Kenyan presidential election, 2007
Kenyan presidential election, 2007
A presidential election was held as part of the Kenyan general election on December 27, 2007; parliamentary elections were held on the same date. Incumbent President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner and sworn in on December 30, despite opposition leader Raila Odinga's claims of victory...
, serious violence broke out in Nairobi. In the Mathare
Mathare
Mathare is a collection of slums in Nairobi, Kenya with a population of approximately 500,000 people; the population of Mathare Valley alone, the oldest of the slums that make up Mathare, is 180,000 people...
slum, Luo gangs burned more than 100 homes.