Kenya and the United States: a shared history

In September 1959, eighty-one young Kenyans stepped off a chartered plane in New York, on their way to colleges they had mostly never seen. Sixty-odd years later, a U.S. president with a Kenyan father has visited Kenya in office, roughly 150,000 Kenyan immigrants live in the United States, and the U.S. sends more money home to Kenya than any other country. The history between the two is closer than most travelers realize, and much of it has a place in Nairobi where you can stand.

This page is the history: the Airlift, the Pan-African links, the Peace Corps, the bombing of 1998, trade and the modern diaspora. For the trip built on these threads, see our heritage travel page and the 10-day heritage itinerary; for Kenyans in the U.S. planning a trip home, start with our diaspora pages.

A timeline

The Airlift, 1959 to 1963

In the late 1950s, as independence approached, Kenya had very few university graduates. The young labor leader Tom Mboya set out to change that. Working with American supporters, among them the African American Students Foundation and figures such as Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson and Sidney Poitier, he arranged scholarships at U.S. colleges and raised money for flights. The first chartered plane carried 81 students to New York in September 1959. In 1960, when funds ran short, the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation gave $100,000, and the program became known as the Kennedy Airlift. By 1963, more than 800 East African students had come to the U.S.

The Airlift generation came home to build the new state: cabinet ministers, judges, university leaders and business founders. The most famous Airlift student is Wangari Maathai, who studied at Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas and went on to found the Green Belt Movement and win the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. Barack Obama Sr. came to the University of Hawaii in 1959 with Mboya's help, but he was not one of the Airlift students. Mboya was assassinated in Nairobi in 1969. His statue stands on Moi Avenue, and his mausoleum is on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria.

Pan-African links and Malcolm X

Kenya's independence leaders were part of a wider Black political world. Jomo Kenyatta attended the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester with W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah. In 1964, months after independence, Malcolm X traveled through East Africa and visited Nairobi, meeting members of the new government. He saw in independent Kenya a model for the Black freedom struggle in America, and he spoke about it on his return. Kenyan historians in Nairobi can walk you through those years, from Uhuru Gardens, where the flag first rose, to the Parliament grounds.

The Peace Corps and the universities

Peace Corps volunteers began serving in Kenya in 1964, and thousands of Americans have taught, worked in health and farmed alongside Kenyans since. Programs have been suspended at times for security reasons and during the pandemic; check the Peace Corps site for the program's current status. American universities followed, with semester programs, research stations and medical partnerships, from field schools in the Rift Valley to long-running teaching hospital partnerships in Eldoret. Today Kenya is one of the most popular study-abroad destinations in Africa for U.S. students.

August 7, 1998

At about 10:30 on the morning of August 7, 1998, a truck bomb exploded at the U.S. embassy in central Nairobi, minutes before a second bomb hit the embassy in Dar es Salaam. Al-Qaeda carried out both attacks. In Nairobi more than 200 people were killed, most of them Kenyans, including 12 Americans, and thousands were injured. The embassy later moved to Gigiri. On the old site, at the corner of Moi Avenue and Haile Selassie Avenue, the August 7th Memorial Park has a garden, a wall with the names of the dead and a small museum. A visit takes about 30 minutes and is a quiet, moving stop on a city walk.

Presidents and partners

Barack Obama visited Kenya as a senator in 2006 and, in July 2015, became the first sitting U.S. president to visit, opening the Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi and speaking to a packed stadium. He returned as a private citizen in 2018, to Kogelo, his father's home village in Siaya County. In May 2024 President William Ruto made a state visit to Washington, and in June 2024 the U.S. designated Kenya a major non-NATO ally, the first in sub-Saharan Africa. Trade grew after AGOA, the 2000 trade law that let Kenyan goods, especially clothing from export processing zones, enter the U.S. duty-free. AGOA's renewal has been a recurring question in Washington, so check its current status if you follow trade.

The diaspora today

The Migration Policy Institute estimated about 150,900 Kenyan immigrants in the U.S. in 2017 to 2021, the largest communities in Texas, Minnesota, Washington state, Georgia, Maryland, California, New York and New Jersey. King County, Washington, has the largest Kenyan-born population of any U.S. county. In the year to May 2025 the U.S. was the source of about 43.5 percent of the roughly KSh 932 billion Kenyans abroad sent home, by far the largest share. Kenyan runners, nurses, doctors, engineers, pastors and students have become part of American life, and their children are now the ones asking to see where their parents grew up.

Where to stand

Most of the Nairobi sites fit into one guided day. Kogelo and Rusinga belong to a western Kenya extension. We build both into heritage trips for HBCU alumni chapters, churches, family reunions and university groups, and into first trips home for Kenyan-American families.