Kenya

Kenya straddles the equator on Africa’s eastern coast. The Great Rift Valley cuts through its western half, a broad trench of volcanoes and soda lakes such as Nakuru and Bogoria, where flamingos gather in pink drifts. East of it rise the central highlands and Mount Kenya, Africa’s second-highest peak, whose red soils grow tea and coffee. The north is dry scrub reaching to Lake Turkana, while the coast around Mombasa and Lamu is hot, humid and fringed with coral reefs.

Fossils from around Lake Turkana, including the near-complete skeleton known as Turkana Boy, are central to the study of human origins. For centuries Lamu, Malindi and Mombasa traded with Arabia, Persia and India. Britain built a railway from Mombasa to Lake Victoria in the 1890s and gave the highlands to white settlers, pushing out Kikuyu, Maasai and other communities. The Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s was put down harshly, but independence followed in 1963.

Runners from the Kalenjin highlands have made the town of Iten a training camp for distance athletes from around the world. Maasai and Samburu herders keep cattle at the centre of social life, and nyama choma, roasted goat, is the meal of every gathering. Tea, coffee, avocados and cut flowers from around Lake Naivasha go to Europe, safari tourism fills the Maasai Mara, and M-Pesa, launched in 2007, made paying by mobile phone ordinary.