The peoples of Kenya

The 2019 census counted 47,564,296 people in 45 main groups, and more than 120 categories once sub-groups are included. No community is a majority: the largest, the Kikuyu, is about 17% of the population. The familiar figure of 42 tribes goes back to the 1969 census, the only one that counted exactly 42.

Almost every indigenous community speaks a language from one of three families: Bantu, Nilotic or Cushitic. That is a classification of speech, not of ancestry. People have intermarried, absorbed one another and switched languages for centuries, and several of today's largest communities are twentieth-century federations of older, smaller peoples.

Practices described on these pages as traditional are historical baselines. Today most Kenyans are Christian or Muslim, live in or near towns, and speak Swahili and English as well as their mother tongue. How the three language families arrived.