Kenya
Occupying 582,650 square kilometers (224,900 square miles) and located on the Indian Ocean coast of East Africa—bordered by Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia—Kenya had an estimated population in 2004 of 32 million. As with nearly all African states, none of which existed in their present form before European powers established colonial territories across the continent at the end of the nineteenth century, Kenya first emerged as a modern state between 1895, when it was carved out as part of the British East Africa protectorate, and 1902, when it was brought under the Colonial Office. Amalgamating a diverse set of peoples carrying varied histories and forms of self-government, the ensuing colonial experience was to have a fundamental effect on the form of government that was established at independence on December 12, 1963, and, importantly, on the substance of challenges that have animated politics ever since. Most easily recognizable are the formal institutions that were inherited at independence, such as parliamentary democracy patterned after the Westminster system, a common law tradition, and the colonial administrative structure. How much these institutions have changed (e.g., the mutation to a presidential system) and continue to change demonstrates both the limits of the "colonial imprint" and the lively, sometimes tragic, internal and external forces beyond colonialism that shape governance in Kenya.
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