Kenya

Kenya: capital Nairobi, population 57.5M, area 580,367 km². The 26th most populous country, in Africa. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Kenya runs from the Indian Ocean coast up through the Great Rift Valley to Lake Turkana in the north, with Nairobi as its capital and Mombasa as its oldest city. The shore around Lake Turkana has produced some of the fullest evidence anywhere for human ancestry, and the coast carried a chain of Swahili trading towns from the eleventh century. Mount Kenya reaches 5,199 metres just south of the equator, the Mara plains take the wildebeest herds each July, and the country's distance runners have set the standard in the marathon for sixty years.

• Kamoya Kimeu found the most complete Homo erectus skeleton known in 1984 by the Nariokotome River near Lake Turkana; the boy had died 1.5 to 1.6 million years earlier, aged between seven and eleven.
• Gedi was one of 116 known Swahili towns strung between southern Somalia and the Kenya-Tanzania border; its stone mosques, palace and pillar tombs were lived in from the eleventh century and abandoned by the early seventeenth.
• Giovanni Battista Cairati laid out Fort Jesus at Mombasa between 1593 and 1596 in the shape of a man seen from above; it is the only fort the Portuguese kept on the Swahili coast.
• Two male lions killed railway workers at Tsavo between March and December 1898, and the pair are still the most studied man-eating cats on record because they hunted people together.

• Wangarĩ Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement to plant trees, was the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, and in 2004 became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Eliud Kipchoge won the Olympic marathon in 2016 and 2020 and ran the distance in 1:59:40 at Vienna in 2019, the first person under two hours though not under record conditions.
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o began in English, switched to writing mainly in Gikuyu and founded the Gikuyu journal Mũtĩiri; his 2016 story The Upright Revolution has been translated into more than 100 languages.
• Kipchoge Keino took two Olympic golds and stands at the head of the line of Kenyan distance runners; he was among the 24 inaugural members of the athletics hall of fame in 2012.

• Mount Kenya rises to 5,199 metres at Batian just 16 kilometres south of the equator, carries eleven shrinking glaciers, and stood about 7,000 metres high before glaciation cut it down.
• Lake Turkana is the largest permanent desert lake and the largest alkaline lake in the world; three rivers feed it, nothing drains it, and its only water loss is evaporation.
• The Maasai Mara runs straight into the Serengeti across the border, and the wildebeest usually cross the Mara River into Kenya in July; Mara means spotted in the Maa language.
• Lamu Town holds 23 mosques and a donkey sanctuary, and its seafront fort was finished in the early 1820s for Fumo Madi ibn Abi Bakr, the sultan of Pate.

• Sheng grew among young people in Nairobi out of Swahili and English, has spread across classes and into Tanzania and Uganda, and has no official standing and no textbook.
• Benga took shape in Nairobi between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, built on Luo folk song and on the soukous, kwela and Cuban dance music the radio was playing.
• The Maasai speak Maa, an Eastern Nilotic language related to Dinka and Nuer, and Kenya's 2019 census counted 1,189,522 of them, up from 377,089 thirty years earlier.
• Lake Nakuru, Lake Elementaita and Lake Bogoria were one deep freshwater lake about 10,000 years ago; the three remnants were listed together by UNESCO in 2011.

What is the capital of Kenya?

The capital of Kenya is Nairobi.

What is the population of Kenya?

Kenya has about 57.5M people — the 26th most populous country in the world.

How big is Kenya?

Kenya covers 580,367 km², making it the 47th largest country by area.

Which region is Kenya in?

Kenya is in Eastern Africa, Africa.