U.S. leaders have courted Kenya for security, stability and tech. Now China is wooing the country.

A glitzy, springtime White House dinner with 450 guests including former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. A top-level meeting with military chiefs at the Pentagon. And designation as America’s foremost strategic partner in Africa. Joe Biden unfurled the red carpet for Kenya during a 2024 state visit to Washington by a dazzled President William Ruto. Donald Trump may sustain the star treatment – if he can keep China at bay.

A year later, the imagery has shifted in seismic ways with a new-old American leader. Just weeks after Trump threatened global tariffs and scrapped almost all development aid to Africa, Ruto made a state visit to Beijing and elevated ties with China as President Xi Jinping looked on with satisfaction. And Ruto said the American-led postwar security and economic order probably is dead.

Biden had declared America’s intent to name the East African nation of 52 million people as a “major non-NATO ally” of the United States, a perk that offers extra training and coordination. Accompanying Ruto during the visit, which started in Atlanta, was America’s billionaire ambassador to Kenya at the time, former eBay and Hewlett Packard chief executive Meg Whitman, who once ran for governor of California. After inspiring stops along the way, including Tyler Perry’s film studio, Africa’s harsh economic realities landed on the agenda in Washington.

“Too many nations are forced to make a choice between development and debt, between investing in their people and paying back their creditors,” Biden said as he talked of “what we’re calling the Nairobi-Washington vision,” to help cash-strapped countries. That effort entails working with global institutions such as the World Bank to free up more financing, public and private. Kenya’s reputation for stability helps.

Under Biden, the cozy U.S. relationship was built on Kenya’s success in fostering a tech hub nicknamed “Silicon Savannah” (hence Meg’s assignment), the deep commitment to climate-friendly renewable energy, staunch support for a U.S.-led international order – including rejection of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – and military and intelligence help in the fight against Islamist extremists in Somalia known as al-Shabaab (The Youth). Some of that agenda clashes with Trump 2.0’s playbook and needs to be reconciled with the dizzying America First agenda and fossil fuel-promoting spin of the White House.

China relations upgraded

Meanwhile, Trump’s team is scrambling to keep Kenya engaged. Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted Ruto’s top foreign-policy adviser two weeks after the China summit. The State Department said the U.S. aim was “to reaffirm the importance of our bilateral relationship with Kenya and discuss how the U.S.-Kenya partnership delivers prosperity by advancing shared economic interests.” For Kenya, that means a trade deal.

Dueling television images greeted Ruto on his return from the splashy Biden visit. In one, Kenyan police officers arrived in Haiti with United Nations Security Council authorization to quell a lawless Caribbean capital in the grip of murderous gang warfare. In the other deadly scene, Kenyan police officers battled Gen Z anti-tax protesters in another turbulent capital – Kenya’s own, Nairobi.

“William Ruto wins in Washington – but does Kenya?” the South Africa-based Institute for Security Studies wondered after the visit, noting that some Kenyans want more focus on domestic woes like the cost of living and relations with other powers, especially China.

The courting of Kenya began with Trump 1.0, who invited then-president Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Kenya’s founder, to the White House for working visits in August 2018 and February 2020. First Lady Melania Trump, wearing riding pants and a colonial-style white pith helmet, showed up in Kenya without her husband to mingle with wildlife.

During the 2020 visit, Trump’s trade negotiator said the United States sought a deal with Kenya that could become a model across Africa and advance continental efforts to unlock commerce among neighboring countries – a perennial challenge. Alas, the pledge came just a few weeks before COVID-19 exploded, disrupting the world’s ways. Biden revived the idea in 2022 by creating a negotiating framework with Kenya with aims aligned with the Trumpian playbook.

In the global arena, Kenyan athletes – like their Ethiopian rivals – excel at long-distance feats: runner Beatrice Chebet took home two gold medals from the Paris Olympics, in the 5,000-meter and 10,000-meter races. In the men’s and women’s marathons, Benson Kipruto and Hellen Obiri each claimed bronze. Endurance in the longest competitions is a kind of metaphor for their country.

Investors seek stability

Kenya’s most prized attributes for investors and expats are stability and relative calm, a contrast with the unrest and threats that many Ethiopians and Somalis endure next door amid internal conflicts. While not immune to spasms of deadly violence, Kenya has generally escaped the worst of volatile African governance.

Colonial cartography traced lines through traditional territories and gathered tribes into awkward communion. Kenya’s political class is dominated by the Kikuyu (Gikuyu), who regard Africa’s second-highest mountain, Mount Kenya (Kere-Nyaga), as sacred terrain. The embodiment of Kukuyu authority is Jomo Kenyatta, who wrote of his people in a famous ethnographic study, Facing Mount Kenya, before becoming Kenya’s independence leader. The brainy Luo (Obama’s dad) and the lanky, leaping, shuka-clad Maasai also festoon the socio-cultural terrain of Kenya yet wield lesser influence.

“Unlike most African states, it has avoided military rule, social instability, warlord-ism, mass murder or social collapse,” British political economist Charles Hornsby said of Kenya in his stupendous history of the nation. “Religious divisions have not led to violence, and attempts at secession have been defeated or deterred. Kenya has never gone to war.”

That might be too generous. Following the December 2007 election, President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, was declared the winner and hastily sworn in for a new term while supporters of his rival, Raila Odinga from the Luo community, disputed the outcome. Independent observers and foreign governments also questioned the counting of ballots. Ethnic violence soon erupted across Kenya as order collapsed. Victims were beheaded, burned alive and hacked to death with machetes, according to prosecutors at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which opened a case on crimes against humanity.

The country pulled back from the brink of civil war only after an intense diplomatic intervention that forged an emergency power-sharing agreement. More than 1,100 people had died, thousands were injured and traumatized and 350,000 had fled their homes. UN human rights investigators said the failure to prosecute past violent perpetrators and a climate of impunity were “major contributing factors” in the attacks.

Since then, equanimity has returned, buttressed by reforms to decentralize governance and incentivize politicians to answer for their actions – or inaction – closer to home. Robust public debate, mostly online, keeps Kenyans engrossed in burning issues – and celebrity scandals. Kenya’s openness to media coverage has translated into Nairobi attracting the BBC’s largest bureau outside Britain, where the Focus on Africa show is produced. Bloomberg operates a major newsroom in the city as does the Chinese government’s China Global Television Network.

The relative lack of major extractives to fight over – such as gold, oil, natural gas, gems and exotic minerals – helps Kenya to maintain social peace. (Britain’s Tullow Oil is selling off its oil interests in northern Kenya, including an estimated 463 million barrels of crude in the ground, while retaining the option to participate in future production.)

Instead, Kenya has exploited abundant geothermal energy thanks to the upwelling of magma along the Rift Valley. The country makes almost half of its electricity from steaming Mother Nature and most of the rest from wind, solar and hydropower. In 2023, Kenya became an associate member of the International Energy Agency, a U.S.-created club of the world’s largest energy producers and consumers.

As a business-minded city of “hustlers,” as Ruto likes to say of Kenya’s scrappy, streetwise entrepreneurs, Nairobi competes with Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for stature in eastern Africa. The city is the hub for Kenya Airways, which partners with Delta Air Lines in codeshare flights. American investment in Kenya’s tech sector has expanded, with the Ruto visit as a catalyst.

Google and G42, a Abu Dhabi-based artificial-intelligence investor, announced a $1 billion investment package including a data center in Olkaria, Kenya, powered by the area’s geothermal energy, for Microsoft Azure in a new “East Africa Cloud Region.” Under this plan, data from other countries can be stored in Kenya yet subject to data protection laws of the source country, according to Microsoft. The partners also plan Swahili-language AI model development and AI training.

After waiting years for Kenyan approval, JP Morgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank, has opened a branch to scale up its business in East Africa. “That’s not going to be doing anything for the earnings of JP Morgan next year,” CEO Jamie Dimon told the Institute of International Finance after a trip to Kenya. “But ten years from now, we’ll have a much better Africa network and that will do a lot for the health of JP Morgan.”

Gen Z demands intensify

What Ruto needs most for Kenya is more financing and investment, rocket fuel for his young population, half younger than 20. Six decades after independence, Kenya’s gross domestic output (GDP), divided across the population, is one-third of what South Africa’s economy generates.

“The Kenyan authorities face a difficult balancing act of fulfilling the aspirations of the Kenyan people by delivering on priority social and developmental needs even as debt servicing obligations consume a large share of government’s revenues,” IMF Deputy Managing Director Nigel Clarke said in December 2024 after consultations with Kenya’s leadership in Nairobi. About 68 percent of revenue goes to paying the debt, which includes borrowings for ambitious highway and railway projects such as the USD 3.2 billion, Chinese-built SGR freight and passenger line from the capital to the coast.

A month after the Washington visit, the shiny image of progress smacked into generational frustration with the political elite, symbolized by the proposed tax hike. Ignited by social media, yet without any apparent leader or central organizer, protests by Gen Z Kenyans, generally in their 20s, spread in June 2024 across the nation, demanding accountability for public spending. The Kenya Human Rights Commission, an independent monitor, accused the government of unleashing the police on protesters, killing at least 63 people.

Javas Bigambo, a Kenyan lawyer and political commentator, said during the protests that opposition to the taxes extended beyond young people to include farmers, businesses and religious leaders. That broad front of opposition carried weight.

“Listening keenly to the people of Kenya, who have said loudly that they want nothing to do with this Finance Bill 2024, I concede,” Ruto said in televised remarks, declining to sign the measure. Instead, he began to engage the 20- and 30-somethings who had risen against it. Leading up to the unrest, the writing was on the wall: in an Afrobarometer survey in 2022, fewer than half of Kenyans agreed that government was using taxes for the well-being of citizens, a lower measure of confidence than shown by Ethiopians, Ghanaians, Senegalese, South Africans and Tanzanians.

The clashes also roughed up international relations. In a joint statement, Britain, the United States, Canada, Germany and other European governments said they were “shocked” by the shooting of protesters outside the Kenyan Parliament as demonstrators stormed the building. “We welcome civic engagement by all Kenyans, in particular the youth, in addressing issues of vital public concern,” the governments said. A BBC Africa Eye investigation concluded that a Kenyan soldier had fired on protesters outside the parliament building.

Protests a year later also drew a huge turnout across the country and gunfire from security forces. At least 19 people died, more than 500 were injured – including police officers and reporters – and 179 people arrested during June 25, 2025, clashes marking one year since the initial Gen Z uprising, the Kenya human rights panel said. During Saba Saba (Seven Seven) protests on July 7, marking the 35th anniversary of pro-democracy demonstrations, 38 people died, most younger than 25, including two children, according to the group.

Under British rule

The unrest may confound casual observers because culturally Kenya has long enjoyed a lofty perch in the outsider’s imaginings of Africa. That narrative gained traction in 1895, when Britain declared a protectorate in East Africa as part of its colonial expansion. The Imperial British East Africa Company transferred its territory to the crown, and vagabond Brits and other Europeans began showing up.

The colonialists embraced the misty uplands, sun-kissed savannas and languid Swahili coast animated by the billowing sails of ancient dhows. Kenya was great for growing tea, coffee and sisal for export. (Africans were left with poorer land to produce maize for their plates.) Tales of the man-eating lions of Tsavo, attacking workers building a railway line from the Indian Ocean coast, burnished Kenya’s adventurous appeal.

Majestic landscapes and romance dominate the Kenya of the mind. Karen Blixen’s 1937 memoir, Out of Africa, surfaced in 1985 as a beloved Hollywood vehicle for Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. A more realistic portrait of Kenya from an African’s perspective is Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s gripping and gritty novel A Grain of Wheat, set in the four days before independence from Britain on December 12, 1963. (Ngugi died in May 2025 in a hospital near Atlanta at 87 years old.)

In a village far from the national celebration, a veteran of the anti-colonial rebellion named General R. steps to the microphone to speak of the meaning of uhuru – freedom. “You ask why we fought, why we lived in the forest with wild beasts,” he tells the crowd before imploring them to uphold the ideals of land and liberty that motivated their fight. “We want a Kenya built on the heroic tradition of resistance of our people.”

Kenya fits Trump’s model of African countries loyal to America that bring something to the table. Expect Kenya’s elite status to continue.

A new digital nomad visa, officially a Class N work permit, enables remote workers and entrepreneurs with clients and income originating outside Kenya to work in the country for one or two years, with the possibility of renewal.

Integration with Ethiopia, Kenya’s big neighbor to the north, could effectively give you a market of around 200 million people in the next 20 years.

University graduates are paid paltry wages, typically less than $1,000 per month, while the bosses reward themselves with ample salaries and perks. You can scoop up top young Kenyan talent by paying a modest premium.

Air connections are improving as Kenya Airways regains financial strength after the downer days of the pandemic. Direct flights are available across Africa, including to Cape Town and Dakar via Abidjan, and to New York, London, Cape Town, Mumbai, Bangkok, Guangzhou, Amsterdam (KLM), Istanbul (Turkish Airlines), Paris (Air France), Frankfurt (Lufthansa), Kuala Lumpur (Air Asia), Dubai (Emirates) and Abu Dhabi (Etihad). Kenya Air and Delta Air Lines are codeshare flight partners.