According to campingship,Kenya is a republic. After years of one-party authoritarian regime in 1991, an amendment to the 1963 Constitution sanctioned the return to multi-partyism. Head of the executive is the President of the Republic, elected for 5 years by direct suffrage; like the National Assembly, which holds legislative power. The judicial system in use in the country is based on the Common Law British with tribal and Islamic influences. The High Court has unlimited jurisdiction in civil and criminal matters and, in addition to representing the last instance of judgment, it also has the function of court of second instance. Next we find ordinary courts and religious courts, for cases relating to Islamic law. The death penalty has been in place, but executions have not taken place since 1987. The armed forces, divided into army, navy and air force, are supported by the local paramilitary police organization. The country receives military assistance from the US and the UK. Military service is carried out on a voluntary basis. With the independence of the country, a state school system was created uniformly spread over the territory; this led to a lowering of the illiteracy rate which, according to a 2006 estimate, stood at 26.4%. The educational cycle is divided into primary school, compulsory and free, lasting 8 years, and secondary school, lasting 4 years and organized into two addresses, the master’s and the technical-professional one: the latter is recognized a lot importance being connected to the problems of economic and technological development. The University of East Africa (Nairobi, 1961) and the Polytechnic Institute of Kenya (Nairobi, 1961) are of great importance.

TERRITORY: MORPHOLOGY

The highlands of Kenya, the Highlands, are, together with the Ethiopian Highlands, the highest sections of the so-called “high Africa”: the average altitude is above 2000 m, which explains the happy climate of the Kenyan land. The Highlands took on their current features following the formation of the Rift Valley, which crosses the territory of Kenya with its eastern branch. The great fracture coincides, to the N, with the Turkana reservoir, whose elongated shape is a clear indication of its tectonic origin; it continues towards S with the hollow occupied by the various lakes (Baringo, Hannington, Nakuru) and finally with the furrow of the Ewaso Ngiro and the Magadi and Natron lakes, on the border with Tanzania. The edges of the trench form, in the central section, a grandiose double mountainous alignment, with the Aberdare Range (3999m in Mount Lesatima) on one side and the Mau Escarpment (3099m) on the other. They are reliefs partly covered by the Cenozoicvolcanic expansions, superimposed on the archaeozoic crystalline substrate, which emerges in large areas of the country. The birth of the great cones that dominate the Highlands is connected to the same volcanic activity, including Kilimanjaro (5895 m) on the edge of Kenya, which however rises in the territory of Tanzania, and Elgon (4321 m), on the border with the ‘Uganda. The highest peak in the country is the Mount Kenya (5199 m), a gigantic pillar that emerged at the time when the fracture of the Rift Valley was formed. The morphology of the Highlands is devoid of great roughness: the profiles are open, but there is no lack here and there of Inselberge, emergencies of ancient granite rocks. Inland, the plateau descends rapidly to the basin of Lake Victoria; on the eastern side instead it gradually lowers, with a series of terraces, towards the coastal plain, which, not very wide at Mombasa, widens to the N of the Galana river, until it reaches 200 km at the border with Somalia. The coast is low, fragmented by islets and lagoons, therefore not very practicable; there is no shortage of long coral reefs. Finally, the northern part of the country – the extreme southern edge of the Ethiopian Highlands – has an average altitude of approx. 800 m and is dominated by granite rocks (Huri mountains, 1480 m; Jibisa, 1605 m) in a typical tabular savannah landscape.

TERRITORY: HYDROGRAPHY

Hydrography is poor. Lake Turkana is an endorheic basin and is almost entirely fed by an Ethiopian river, the Omo. Endorheic are also the other lakes of the central and southern section of the pit, all highly salty. Eastern Kenya, however, pays tribute to the Indian Ocean above all through the Tana and Galana rivers (to whose alluvial contributions we owe a large part of the coastal plains); they originate on the external slope of the escarpment that borders the pit, and their regime, linked to the rhythm of rainfall, is very variable during the year. For the remainder, the hydrographic network is mostly represented by wadis.