The coast was never peripheral
Swahili city-states — Mombasa, Malindi, Lamu, Gede, Pate — were trading across the Indian Ocean from around the eighth century. Swahili is a Bantu language that absorbed Arabic, Persian and later Portuguese and English vocabulary without ceasing to be Bantu, which is a fair description of the coast itself.
The Portuguese arrived at the end of the fifteenth century and built Fort Jesus at Mombasa in 1593. Omani forces took it in 1698 after a siege of nearly three years. Zanzibar governed much of the coast until the British protectorate.
A country built around a railway
The Uganda Railway ran from Mombasa towards Lake Victoria between 1896 and 1901. Nairobi exists because it was a convenient depot. Thousands of indentured labourers were brought from British India, and those who stayed became the foundation of Kenya's Asian community.
The railway needed to pay for itself, so the highlands were opened to European settlement and the people already farming them were moved into reserves. That single decision — land — runs through everything that follows.
The Mau Mau revolt began in earnest in 1952 and the emergency lasted until 1960. Kenyan casualties ran into the tens of thousands and more than a hundred thousand people were held in detention camps. In 2013 the British government expressed regret and paid compensation to 5,228 survivors, after documents it had said did not exist were found in a Foreign Office archive.
One party, then two, then forty-seven counties
Independence came in December 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta, a republic a year later. Daniel arap Moi governed from 1978 to 2002, for most of it under a constitutional one-party state. Multi-party elections resumed in 1992; the opposition finally won in 2002.
The 2007 election broke that progress. Around 1,100 people were killed and hundreds of thousands displaced after a disputed count. The response was the 2010 constitution — a genuine settlement rather than a cosmetic one, devolving budget and authority to 47 counties and creating a Supreme Court that in 2017 annulled a presidential election, the first time any African court had done so.
Money on a phone
M-Pesa launched in 2007 as a way to repay microfinance loans by text message. Within a few years a majority of Kenyan adults were using it, and a substantial share of the country's economy was moving through basic handsets. Kenyans were settling bills by phone while London and New York were still writing cheques.
The lesson usually drawn is about technology. The more useful one is about regulation: the central bank let it run before it fully understood it, which is the opposite of what happened almost everywhere else.