Pillar route
Ecology and environment
How climate, water, forests, wildlife, conservation, pollution, and tourism connect ecosystems to politics and livelihoods.
Ecology and environment
Conservation, carbon, climate, land-use, parks, water, and the environment as a political field.
- economic system
Land and resources
Property, title, grabs, extraction, settlement, conservation, minerals, and the politics of who owns the ground.
economypoliticssocietywar - economic system
Northern Kenya carbon-credit frontier: conservancies, soil carbon and pastoral land
Northern community rangelands now produce carbon credits: grazing plans, soil-carbon models, Verra certification, Community Land Act consent, court fights...
environmentpoliticseconomysociety - economic system
Maasai Mara: reserve, conservancy belt, tourism and Maasai land
The Maasai Mara is not a private national park. The core is a county reserve, while the surrounding conservancy belt grew from group-ranch law, subdivision...
economypoliticsenvironmentsociety - nation
Laikipia and the conservancy frontier: ranches, wildlife, soldiers and pastoralists
Laikipia is the ranch-and-conservancy afterlife of the White Highlands: Maasai removal, settler ranches, BATUK/Nanyuki, Ol Jogi, Lewa, Ol Pejeta, Northern Rangelands Trust, armed rangers...
politicsenvironmenteconomysociety - conflict
Mau Forest and the Ogiek: water tower, conservation and restitution
The Mau Forest story is not just conservation: Ogiek honey tenure, colonial forest reserves, hunting bans, water-tower politics, eviction, African Court recognition, reparations and continued removals.
societypoliticsenvironmentdiplomacy - nation
Turkana: pastoral resistance, lake heritage, oil and drought
Turkana ties Kenya to the northern drylands: early herding, Turkana expansion, El Molo lake survival, colonial disarmament, school neglect, World Heritage fossil landscapes, oil politics, drought and water insecurity.
societyeconomyscienceenvironment - nation
Taita-Taveta and Tsavo: war corridor, sisal estates, parks and landlessness
Taita-Taveta is a corridor story: Taita hills, Taveta caravan routes, mission coffee, Tsavo railway violence, First World War occupation, sisal estates, labour reserve status, national parks and Waata marginalisation.
societypoliticseconomyenvironment - nation
Tana River and Lamu hinterland: Pokomo, Orma, Aweer and delta land
The Tana-Lamu hinterland is river, forest and security frontier: Shungwaya traditions, Pokomo floodplain farming, Orma pastoralism, Aweer forest life, slave raids, delta land pressure...
societyenvironmentwareconomy - nation
Nyanza and Kisumu: lake economy, Luo opposition and state repression
Nyanza is lake economy plus opposition memory: Luo migrations, Kisumu railhead, labour reserve, Kavirondo protest, Odinga, KPU, Mboya, the Kisumu massacre, Ouko and police violence in election cycles.
societypoliticseconomywar - nation
Mombasa and the coast: port, strip, slavery and land
The coast is Kenya before the highlands: Swahili towns, Mijikenda kaya forests, slavery and plantations, the ten-mile strip, Mombasa labour, land titles, Mwambao, the MRC and the SGR port corridor.
politicseconomysocietywar - nation
Uhuru Kenyatta: dynasty, Jubilee, debt, and the handshake state
Uhuru Kenyatta full history and Kenya story: son of Jomo Kenyatta and Mama Ngina, Catholic family background, St Marys School, Amherst College, private-school elite pipeline, rugby and prefect culture...
politicssocietyeconomyreligion - nation
Mwai Kibaki: economist, opposition bridge, and Kenya's post-Moi presidency
Mwai Kibaki full history: Gatuyaini and Othaya childhood, Karima Mission, Mathari masonry and carpentry, Mangu, Makerere, London School of Economics, KANU executive officer, Donholm and Othaya MP, Commerce Minister...
politicseconomysocietyreligion - economy
Timau: Mount Kenya settler farms, flowers, and the Laikipia edge
Timau as a Mount Kenya-Laikipia edge case: a Meru/Buuri town on the Nanyuki road where Meru conquest, Maasai-Laikipia dispossession, White Highlands settler farms, soldier settlers, Kisima Farm, Timau settlement schemes...
economypoliticssocietywar - society
Dorobo is not one tribe: Okiek, Yaaku, and Kenya's forest peoples
The story behind Dorobo and Ndorobo: an outsider Maa/Swahili label for hunter-gatherers without cattle, applied to Okiek, Yaaku/Mukogodo, Sengwer and other forest peoples...
societyculturepoliticsenvironment - economy
The Ilchamus of Lake Baringo
A small Maa-speaking people of Lake Baringo known for indigenous irrigation and palm-wood boats, long fighting for recognition and representation.
economyculturesocietypolitics - society
The Oromo pastoralists of the north: Gabra, Sakuye and Orma
Oromo-speaking camel and cattle peoples of the arid north and the Tana: the Gabra of the Chalbi, the Sakuye devastated by the Shifta War, and the Orma of the river.
societyeconomywarenvironment - culture
The Suba of Lake Victoria
A Bantu people of the lake islands who came from Buganda and were slowly absorbed into the Luo, now working to revive an endangered language.
culturesocietyreligioneconomy - society
Kenya's hunter-gatherers: the forest and lake foragers
The Dorobo/Ndorobo label and the peoples behind it: Ogiek honey-hunters of the Mau, El Molo of Lake Turkana, Waata elephant-hunters, Yaaku/Mukogodo and Aweer forest people...
societycultureenvironmentpolitics - environment
Fortress conservation: parks, conservancies, and the landless
Whether Kenya's parks and conservancies are oppression: the parks built by eviction, the Mara reserve and lease belt, the Ogiek and Sengwer driven off for wildlife...
environmentsocietypoliticseconomy - nation
Kenya's Nilotes: Luo, Maasai, Kalenjin, and Turkana
The deep past of Kenya's Nilotic peoples: the Luo migration down the Nile into the lake region, the Maasai expansion with their moran warriors and laibon prophets, the Kalenjin and the orkoiyot...
societypoliticsculturereligion - environment
Conservation and land: the conservancies of northern Kenya
Land ownership in the guise of conservation: the white-owned Laikipia ranches that survived independence, the donor-funded Northern Rangelands Trust and conservancies like Lewa and Ol Pejeta with their armed rangers...
environmentpoliticseconomysociety - politics
The Free World's clients: the West's unfree allies
The roster of regimes the Western powers backed to hold the line in the Cold War, and how few were free: the Latin American juntas and Operation Condor; the Asian allies from Park and Chiang to Marcos and Suharto...
politicswardiplomacyeconomy - conflict
Mau Mau: the uprising, the camps, and the reckoning
Kenya's Mau Mau uprising and the British counter-insurgency: the land alienation and colour bar that fed it, the oathing movement, the 1952 Emergency and the Kapenguria trial, Dedan Kimathi and the forest fighters...
politicswarsocietyculture - politics
Operation Legacy: the empire burned its records
How Britain covered its tracks at the end of empire: the destruction and secret removal of colonial-government files, known as Operation Legacy, so records of torture, killings...
politicsdiplomacyculturewar - movement
Global sport as power: the Olympics and FIFA
How sport became a global power system: Coubertin's Olympic revival and the self-perpetuating IOC, FIFA's rise into one of the world's richest bodies...
politicseconomydiplomacyculture - religion
Mormonism and Freemasonry
The documented link between the LDS Church and the Masonic lodge: Joseph Smith's initiation as a Freemason at Nauvoo in 1842, the temple endowment introduced weeks later and its well-documented parallels to Masonic...
religionsocietyculturepolitics - pillar
The pillars of modern power
The load-bearing power blocks of modern society, read off the data itself: money and finance; state, law, and coercion; military and security; production and labor; land and resources; infrastructure and logistics...
pillarpoliticseconomysociety