Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
With 47.3 million people, Kenya contains the region’s largest city, Nairobi, and principal port, Mombasa. After gaining independence from Britain in 1963, Kenya chose a capitalist path of development, aligning itself with Western interests. . . . Kenya built a relatively prosperous economy based on exports of coffee, tea, and other food products as well as a thriving tourist industry . . . But the good times lasted barely a generation as increasingly serious problems arose. Kenya during the 1980s had the highest rate of population increase in the world, and pressure on farmlands and fringes of the wildlife preserves steadily mounted--leading to widespread poaching and a concomitant decline in tourism. Beginning in the mid-1990s, excessive rains triggered massive flooding that was followed by the onset of a long and disastrous drought, resulting in famine across most of the interior. Meanwhile, government corruption siphoned off public funds that should have been invested, and ethnic tensions were allowed to explode into outbreaks of violence, especially after the 2008 fraudulent presidential election. Moreover, the HIV/AIDS pandemic dealt the country a devastating blow . . ." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 311-2]