Mpeke­toni, site of the mas­sacre on Sun­day of at least 56 peo­ple, was cre­ated in the 1960s by a large in­flux of Kikuyu who had been dis­placed from their land in Cen­tral Kenya dur­ing the State of Emer­gency in the 1950s. The coastal town in Lamu county, which was pre­dom­i­nantly Mus­lim, re­ceived the ex­o­dus of dis­pos­sessed farm­ers who had
lost their land dur­ing the strug­gle for In­de­pen­dence.
The name Mpeke­toni is an ad­mix­ture of Swahili and Eng­lish, the Swahili term “mpe” mean­ing to give one, and “ka­toni”, a ver­sion of the Eng­lish word car­ton. As the dis­placed Kikuyus were un­loaded from the lor­ries, the sup­plies of­fi­cer in charge or­dered that each fam­ily be given one car­ton of sup­plies. Hence, the name Mpeke­toni as we know
it to­day. The pop­u­la­tion in the late 1990s was es­ti­mated at 25,000.

To­day it has around 50,000 peo­ple and is the most pop­u­lous di­vi­sion of Lamu county. Ten­sion be­tween set­tlers and orig­i­nal in­hab­i­tants has been on­go­ing, as many lo­cals say they have been de­prived of their land that was given to the
new­com­ers. Be­fore the ar­rival of the set­tlers, Mpeke­toni and its sur­round­ings were in­hab­ited by Swahilis called
Waba­juni and a small com­mu­nity of hunters and gath­er­ers known as Wasanye, or the Sanyes, who are al­most ex­tinct. In ad­di­tion to the Kikuyus, other Kenyans who had gone into self-im­posed ex­ile in Tan­za­nia, de­cided to re­turn af­ter In­de­pen­dence.
Other com­mu­ni­ties in Mpeke­toni in­clude Luos and Kam­bas. Lamu is the only county in Kenya which has nearly has nearly 50 per­cent non-in­dige­nous pop­u­la­tion, around 22 per­cent of the en­tire county. Jomo Keny­atta, the first
pres­i­dent, was be­hind the ini­tial push to re­set­tle IDPs and cur­rent Pres­i­dent Uhuru Keny­atta has do­nated land to re­set­tle more farm­ers.
Many lo­cals are op­posed to the gov­ern­men­t’s move to re­set­tle IDPs in the area. They have com­plained that post­elec­tion vi­o­lence cre­ated a new in­flux of IDPs who are con­tin­u­ally stream­ing to Mpeke­toni and branch­ing out into other nearby ur­ban cen­tres such as Witu and Mkunumbi. Last year Pres­i­dent Uhuru do­nated land for the
set­tle­ment of IDPs there.

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