Report on Citizenship Law: Kenya the current Constitution of Kenya in 20103. With the new Constitution, a number of laws, including the citizenship laws were accordingly revised and amended. This report shall set out the developments of Kenya’s citizenship regime tracing it from the colonial era to the present, highlighting relevant key phases and changes over the years and what may have influenced them. The report also discusses the implementation and application of the laws by both the administrative authorities and the judiciary. The report ends with a discussion of some of the on-going debates around citizenship in Kenya. 2. The colonial period (1895-1963) Prior to colonialism, what was later to become the country of Kenya was composed of various communities mainly connected through kinship or common ancestral links. It is claimed that most of these communities were ‘highly acephalous and segmented’, characterised further by fluid ethnic boundaries and interactions mainly through, ‘trade, intermarriages, limited and intermittent warfare’4. Society was thus based strongly on kinship ties and ethnicity, a trait that continues to permeate notions of social and political belongingness, and consequently influences definitions and understandings of nationhood in most African states. When the Europeans embarked on the imperialist project benchmarked by the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, the territory that was later to become Kenya was an object of dispute between the British and the Germans who by then had control over most of Tanganyika to the south of Kenya. In 1886, the Anglo-German agreement and subsequent supplementary agreements settled the matter over which colonial authority would have control over which territory. Accordingly, in 1895, Kenya was declared a British protectorate, except for a narrow coastal strip about ten miles wide which was recognised as the territory of the Sultan of Zanzibar. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, Arabs and Asians had come to East Africa pursuing trade interests, particularly in slaves. Many of them, therefore settled along the coastal areas which were by then the major entry point to the hinterland. In the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese tried to take over control of the coast5, they were driven away by the Arabs who later took control of most of the coastal area. Therefore, by the time the Europeans took over this territory, it was composed of a mixed population. Owing to its agricultural potential, British settlers moved into Kenya and took possession of large tracts of land for agricultural production. In 1920, Kenya was declared a Crown Colony to be administered by a British governor. However, the coastal strip that belonged to the Sultanate of Zanzibar, and other territories that would later be ceded to Somalia became the Kenya Protectorate in 19216. The settler community needed labour in plenty for various projects including work on the agricultural plantations, building infrastructure such as 3 The constitution review process had been initiated almost a decade earlier, the Constitution of Kenya Review Act was enacted in 1998, and the Constitution of Kenya Review Commission was established in 2000, but the process stalled for various reasons, including rejection of an initial draft constitution in a referendum held in 2005. After the 2007-8 post-election violence, the constitution review process became a top priority. 4 P O Ndege, ‘Colonialism and its legacies in Kenya’, A lecture delivered during the Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad Program, July 5th to August 6th 2009 at the Moi University Main Campus, available at http://africanphilanthropy.issuelab.org/resources/19699/19699.pdf accessed on 5 January 2020. 5 A Y Lodhi, ‘Muslims in Eastern Africa- their past and present’, Nordic Journal of African Studies (1994) 3 (1), 88 at 89. 6 L Fransman, Fransman’s British Nationality Law, 3 ed. (Bloomsbury Professional 2011) p. 1036.Ibid. 2 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/7- © 2020 Author(s)