Kenya

Kenya is a country in Africa.

The equator is an imaginary line around the middle of Earth. It goes right across Kenya. Kenya has a tall mountain with snow on top. It has big lakes and a long, warm coast. The capital city is Nairobi.

Kenya is in East Africa, on the shore of the Indian Ocean. The equator, the imaginary line around the middle of Earth, runs right across it. In the east, the land slopes gently down to the sea. In the west, it climbs through hills and high plains to the Great Rift Valley.

Kenya's highest mountain, Mount Kenya, stands right on the equator and still has glaciers near its top. The country's capital is Nairobi. In 2026 Kenya's statistics bureau expected about 54 million people to live in Kenya, and many of them speak Swahili.

Britannica describes Kenya as bisected by the equator and divided by the 38th meridian east into two contrasting halves. The eastern half slopes gently to a coral-backed seashore; the western half rises through hills and plateaus to the Eastern Rift Valley, called the Central Rift in Kenya, beyond which a plateau slopes west to Lake Victoria. Its regions are the Lake Victoria basin, the Rift Valley and its highlands, the eastern plateau forelands, the semiarid and arid north and south, and the coast.

Kenya covers about 580,000 square kilometers. The 2019 census, the country's eighth and its first paperless one, counted 47,564,296 people, up from 37.7 million in 2009, and the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics projects 54,227,015 people for mid-2026. Swahili and English are both used as official languages in the National Assembly and the courts.

Nairobi is the capital city of Kenya.

It has many tall buildings. Mombasa is a city by the sea. It has a big old fort. On an island called Lamu, there is a very old town with narrow streets.

Nairobi, the capital, was once a Maasai watering hole. It grew into a city after a railway came through at the start of the 1900s, and it sits about 1,680 meters above sea level. Mombasa, on the coast, has one of the best natural harbors in East Africa and is Kenya's largest coastal city.

At the southern edge of old Mombasa stands Fort Jesus, a fort built by the Portuguese at the end of the 1500s. About 350 kilometers north, Lamu Old Town has narrow streets and stone houses. People have lived there without a break for more than 700 years.

Nairobi began as a Maasai watering hole and became important because of the railroad that reached the area at the beginning of the 20th century. Mombasa, with one of the best natural harbors in East Africa, is the largest coastal city. Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, was the railway's lake terminus: the first locomotive arrived in December 1901.

UNESCO lists Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese at the end of the 16th century on a spur of coral rock at Mombasa's southern edge, as a World Heritage Site (2011); its five bastions follow Renaissance military design. Lamu Old Town (2001), some 350 km north of Mombasa, is the oldest and best-preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa, continuously inhabited for over 700 years. Its buildings, made of coral, lime and mangrove poles, blend Swahili, Arabic, Persian, Indian and European styles.

Mount Kenya is the tallest mountain in Kenya.

It has ice near its top. A long, deep valley cuts across Kenya. It is called the Great Rift Valley. Lake Victoria is the biggest lake in Africa.

Mount Kenya is 5,199 meters high, the second-highest peak in Africa. It is an old volcano that no longer erupts, and 12 small glaciers still cling to it, all shrinking fast.

The Great Rift Valley runs through western Kenya from north to south. It is 50 to 130 kilometers wide, and a chain of shallow lakes lies along its floor. In the far west, Lake Victoria is the largest lake in Africa. The north of Kenya is dry and hot, while the coast is warm and damp all year.

UNESCO describes Mount Kenya, 5,199 m and about 193 km northeast of Nairobi, as Africa's second-highest peak: an ancient extinct volcano that may have reached 6,500 m when it was active, 3.1 to 2.6 million years ago. Twelve remnant glaciers, all receding rapidly, survive on it. Above the highland forest, Britannica describes a bamboo zone to about 3,000 m and then moorland with tree heaths, tree groundsel and giant lobelia.

The Rift Valley is 50 to 130 km wide; its floor rises from about 450 m near Lake Turkana to over 2,100 m at Lake Naivasha and drops to 600 m at the Tanzanian border, with shallow lakes separated by extinct volcanoes. Lake Victoria, 69,484 km² in Britannica's figure, is the largest lake in Africa and a major reservoir of the Nile. Lake Turkana, which UNESCO calls the largest desert lake in the world, stretches 249 km from north to south. Seasons follow the pressure systems of the western Indian Ocean, and the main rainy season runs from late March to May.

Many wild animals live in Kenya.

Zebras and wildebeest eat grass on the plains. Lions and cheetahs live there too. Pink flamingos crowd some of the lakes. Hippos and crocodiles live in the rivers.

Kenya's grasslands hold huge herds of grazing animals, such as wildebeest, zebras, gazelles, impalas and buffalo. Lions, spotted hyenas, leopards, cheetahs and wild dogs hunt them. Elephants, rhinoceroses and giraffes live in the dry thornbush, and hippos and crocodiles live in the big rivers.

On three shallow lakes in the Rift Valley, up to 4 million lesser flamingos move from lake to lake for most of the year. Most of Kenya's wildlife lives outside its national parks. In the mid-1990s, the Kenya Wildlife Service began a program to involve local communities in managing the animals and sharing the money they bring in.

Britannica links Kenya's wildlife closely to its vegetation zones. Highland rainforests hold elephants and rhinoceroses, both much reduced by poaching and deforestation, along with bushbuck and colobus monkeys. The grasslands carry the largest herds: hartebeest, wildebeest, zebra, gazelle, waterbuck, impala, eland, warthog and buffalo, preyed on by lions, spotted hyenas, leopards, cheetahs and wild dogs.

The Kenya Lake System (UNESCO, 2011), the alkaline Lakes Bogoria, Nakuru and Elementaita, supports up to 4 million lesser flamingos that move between the three lakes for most of the year. Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, part of the Mount Kenya World Heritage Site, holds the world's largest resident population of Grevy's zebra, and the island parks of Lake Turkana are breeding grounds for Nile crocodiles and hippopotamuses. Because most wildlife lives outside the parks, the Kenya Wildlife Service introduced a 'parks beyond parks' program in the mid-1990s to involve local communities in managing animals and sharing the income from them.

About 54 million people live in Kenya.

They speak many different languages. Swahili helps people from different places talk together. Ugali is a common food all over Kenya. It is a soft food made from corn.

About 54 million people live in Kenya, belonging to many groups with their own languages. Swahili is the language that people from different groups often use to talk and trade with each other. It grew up along the coast and took words from Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, Hindi and English. Swahili and English are used in Kenya's parliament and courts.

A common food is ugali, a soft mush made from corn and often served with greens such as kale. Chapati, a flat fried bread, came from India. Children can go to free public school from preprimary through secondary school.

Almost all Kenyans belong to African peoples speaking languages of three families. Bantu is by far the largest, concentrated in the southern third of the country: the Kikuyu, Kamba, Meru and Nyika of the central highlands and the Luhya and Gusii of the Lake Victoria basin. Nilo-Saharan languages include Kalenjin, Luo, Maasai, Samburu and Turkana, and Afro-Asiatic speakers such as the Somali and Oromo live in the arid north and northeast. People of Indian, Pakistani and British origin live mainly in the cities. Swahili, which grew on the coast from Bantu languages with Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, Hindi and English elements, is the lingua franca.

More than four-fifths of Kenyans are Christian and Muslims form a sizable minority; Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula introduced Islam about the 8th century. Kenyan cooking shows British, Arab and Indian influences: ugali with greens, chapati, rice, fish and coconut-flavored stews, and irio, a stew of peas, corn and potatoes, in Kikuyu areas. Public preprimary, primary and secondary education is free, and more than four-fifths of the population is literate.