Kenya document photos online

When Kenya unveiled its new banknotes in 2019, the country's 2010 Constitution had just made one thing illegal: putting any living or historical individual's portrait on the currency, a rule written to break the personality cults of past presidents. Yet the new 1,000-shilling note clearly showed founding president Jomo Kenyatta's likeness. An activist sued. The High Court's escape hatch was almost poetic: the image was not a portrait of the man, the judges ruled, but a photograph of his statue standing in front of the Nairobi conference centre, so technically it broke no law.

• Currency law Kenya's 2010 Constitution (Article 231) bans any individual's portrait on banknotes, so the 2019 notes feature the Big Five wildlife and a national monument instead of presidents.
• Statue loophole When sued over the founding president's face appearing on the 1,000-shilling note, Kenya's High Court ruled it was legal because the image depicted his statue, not the man himself.
• Passport power The Kenyan passport ranked 64th worldwide on the Henley Passport Index (2026), giving its holders visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 69 destinations.
• E-passport Kenya began issuing the East African Community biometric e-passport in September 2017 and fully retired the old machine-readable booklet, completing migration by late 2022.
• Citizenship Until 2010 only a Kenyan father could pass on citizenship; the new Constitution lets either parent transmit it and, for the first time, permits Kenyans by birth to hold dual citizenship.
• Currency origin The Kenyan shilling was born on 14 September 1966, replacing the shared East African shilling at par, and is subdivided into 100 cents.
• Human origins Lake Turkana's Koobi Fora has yielded so many hominin fossils that Kenya holds roughly 1,000 early-human specimens, including the 1.6-million-year-old 'Turkana Boy,' the most complete early-human skeleton ever found.
• Desert lake Lake Turkana in Kenya's far north is the world's largest permanent desert lake and largest alkaline lake, a jade-green sea stretching across 6,405 square kilometres.
• Disclosure rule A Kenyan who acquires a second nationality must formally disclose that other citizenship within three months under the Citizenship and Immigration Act.