Kenya Emoji

🇰🇪 the Kenya flag emoji shows three horizontal bands, black, red and green, separated by thin white stripes, with a red, black and white Maasai shield and two crossed white spears in the middle. Like every flag emoji it is not a picture but two regional indicator symbols, 🇰 and 🇪, for the country code KE, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters KE instead, but whoever opens your message on a phone, WhatsApp included, sees the flag.

The flag was first raised at independence on 12 December 1963, and it grew out of the flag of KANU, the party that led the country to independence. The usual reading of the Kenya flag colours: black for the people of Kenya, red for the blood shed in the struggle for freedom, green for the land and its wealth, and white for peace. The shield and spears stand for the defence of that freedom. Where the flag doesn't fit, people write the colours as hearts, 🖤❤️💚🤍, in usernames, bios and every Jamhuri Day post.

The coat of arms takes the same shield and puts a white cockerel on it, raising an axe 🐓🪓, a symbol of a new and prosperous life. Two lions 🦁 hold it up, each with a spear, standing on Mount Kenya 🏔️ among coffee, tea, pyrethrum, sisal, pineapple and maize. Underneath runs the national motto, Harambee, "let us all pull together", the word for the community fundraisers where neighbours pool money for a school, a hospital bill or a wedding 🤝. The lion is often called Kenya's national animal, though the constitution names none, and the national anthem, Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu ("O God of all creation"), is sung in Swahili and English.

Kenya currency symbol: the shilling, KSh and M-Pesa

The Kenyan shilling (ISO code KES) is divided into 100 cents and has no special Unicode sign. Kenyans write it with letters in front of the amount, KSh 500 or Ksh 500, banks write KES 500, and on receipts, price tags and in East African handwriting you will also see the old shorthand 500/=, where the slash and equals sign mean "shillings, no cents". So the "Kenya shilling symbol" you can copy is simply KSh; in chats people add 🪙, 💵 or 💰.

The 2010 constitution forbids portraits of any person on Kenyan money, so the coins issued since 2018 show animals instead of presidents, and the banknotes of 2019 followed. A great deal of everyday money in Kenya, though, moves as text: M-Pesa, launched by Safaricom in 2007, lets anyone send shillings from a basic phone, and paying for a matatu fare, a market bag of tomatoes or a Harambee contribution by M-Pesa is ordinary. 📱💸 is the emoji for "I've sent it", and "nitumie" (send it to me) 📲 the reply people hope for.

Kenyan letters: Swahili, Gĩkũyũ ĩ and ũ, and how to type them

Kenya has two official languages, Swahili and English, and Swahili is also the national language. By CLDR estimates about 38 million of Kenya's roughly 58 million people speak Swahili and about 11 million English, and dozens of other languages are spoken at home, Kikuyu (about 10 million speakers), Luyia, Luo, Kalenjin, Kamba, Gusii, Meru, Maasai, Embu and Somali among them. Swahili needs no special letters at all: it is written in plain Latin letters, without q or x, and c appears only in ch. In Nairobi much of it comes mixed with English as Sheng: "Niaje!" "Poa!" ("What's up?" "Cool!").

The letters that do need copying come from Gĩkũyũ, as Kikuyu speakers write the name of their language. It has seven vowels, and two of them carry a tilde: ĩ is a closed e, close to the vowel of French été, while plain e is the open e of "bed"; ũ is a closed o, as in "go" without the glide, while plain o is the open o of "law". Careful writing keeps the tildes: Mũgĩkũyũ is one Kikuyu person and Agĩkũyũ the people, and the writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o kept the tildes in his name. Kamba (Kĩkamba), Meru (Kĩmĩrũ) and Embu (Kĩembu) use the same two letters; Maasai, Luo and the other languages have their own collections, as do Swahili and English.

To type ĩ and ũ on Windows, type the code 0129 (ĩ), 0169 (ũ), 0128 (Ĩ) or 0168 (Ũ) in Word and press Alt+X, or copy them from this page: the usual Alt+0 codes don't cover them. On a Mac, switch the input source to ABC Extended, press Option+N, then i or u. On a phone, copy them from here or add a Kikuyu keyboard if yours offers one. In HTML they are ĩ and ũ (capitals Ĩ and Ũ).

Kenya safari emoji: the Big Five, the Mara and the coast

The Big Five, lion 🦁, elephant 🐘, buffalo 🐃, leopard 🐆 and rhino 🦏, are the classic safari emoji to post with 🇰🇪, often from the back of a safari van 🚙. Add 🦒 🦓 🦛 🐊 for the rest of a game drive. Between about July and October the Great Migration crosses from Tanzania's Serengeti into the Maasai Mara, and the crossings of the Mara River, with crocodiles waiting, are among the most dramatic scenes of the year to film; dawn balloon flights over the Mara 🎈🌅 are a classic splurge. Lake Nakuru and Lake Bogoria are famous for their pink crowds of flamingos 🦩, Amboseli for elephants under Kilimanjaro, and Nairobi National Park for giraffes grazing with the skyscrapers of the capital behind them 🦒🏙️.

Ol Pejeta is where the last two northern white rhinos, Najin and Fatu, live under armed guard; the last male, Sudan, died there in 2018, and 🦏💔 was how much of Kenya posted the news. Mount Kenya 🏔️, 5,199 m and the second highest mountain in Africa, gave the country its name, and the Rift Valley runs through the middle of it with volcanoes like Longonot 🌋 and the deserts of the north around Lake Turkana 🏜️🐪. The flat-topped acacia 🌳 is the tree of every savanna photo, and 🌱 is tree planting, the cause of Wangari Maathai, whose Green Belt Movement planted tens of millions of trees.

On the Indian Ocean coast, Diani and Watamu are the beach emoji 🏖️🌴, with turtles 🐢, dolphins 🐬 and reef fish 🐠 in the marine parks. Lamu's old Swahili town, where donkeys are still the traffic and wooden dhows ⛵ sail in and out of the harbour, is on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and so is Fort Jesus 🏰, the Portuguese fort that has guarded Mombasa harbour since the 1590s.

Kenyan food emoji: ugali, nyama choma, chapati and chai

Ugali, stiff maize porridge eaten with the hand, is the meal of most Kenyan days; with no ugali emoji, people send 🌽 for it and 🥬 for sukuma wiki, the braised greens whose name means "push the week". Nyama choma, roast meat, usually goat 🐐, grilled slowly and shared on a wooden board with friends, is 🍖🔥 or 🥩, with kachumbari, a fresh salad of tomato 🍅, onion 🧅 and chilli 🌶️, on the side.

Chapati 🫓, the soft, layered flatbread made for Christmas and every special meal, came with the Indian community, and so did the samosa, the nearest emoji for which is 🥟. Mandazi, the slightly sweet, cardamom-scented fried bread of breakfast and roadside kiosks, is usually 🍩. 🍛 is pilau, the spiced rice of coastal weddings, and 🍚 wali wa nazi, rice cooked in coconut milk 🥥. 🫘🌽 is githeri, maize and beans; 🥔🫛 mukimo, mashed potatoes, peas, maize and greens from central Kenya; 🍟🥚 chips mayai, chips cooked into an omelette; and 🐟 is fried tilapia from Lake Victoria in Kisumu. Mangoes 🥭, avocados 🥑, bananas 🍌 and Thika pineapples 🍍 fill the markets, and Kenya is one of Africa's biggest avocado exporters.

Tea is the national drink: Kenya is one of the world's largest exporters of black tea 🍵🍃, grown on the hills around Kericho and Mount Kenya, and at home it is drunk as chai, boiled with milk and plenty of sugar ☕🫖. Kenyan coffee ☕ is prized abroad, cut roses 🌹💐 from Lake Naivasha fill European flower shops, and 🌼 is pyrethrum, the daisy grown for natural insecticide that sits on the coat of arms. 🥛 is mursik, the smoked, fermented milk of the Kalenjin, served to returning champions, and 🍺 is a cold Tusker, the lager with an elephant on the label.

Kenya emoji combos: runners, matatus and holidays

🏃🇰🇪 is the running emoji with the Kenyan flag, and nobody needs it explained. Eliud Kipchoge won the Olympic marathon twice, in 2016 and 2021, and in Vienna in October 2019 ran the first marathon under two hours, 1:59:40, in a specially paced run that does not count as a record ⏱️. David Rudisha's 800 m world record of 1:40.91 came at the London Olympics in 2012, and Faith Kipyegon has won three Olympic 1500 m titles in a row 🥇🥇🥇. The rugby sevens side, Shujaa 🏉, the Harambee Stars ⚽, the Mashemeji derby between Gor Mahia and AFC Leopards, and the cricket team that reached the 2003 World Cup semi-final 🏏 have their own fans.

On the road, 🚐 is the matatu, the privately run minibus that carries much of Nairobi to work, often painted from bumper to bumper and loud with music, 🏍️ the boda boda motorbike taxi, whose name comes from the "border, border" bicycle taxis at the Uganda frontier in Busia, and 🛺 the tuk-tuk of Mombasa. 🚆 is the Madaraka Express between Mombasa and Nairobi, opened in 2017, and 🚂 the old metre-gauge Uganda Railway beside it, built from 1896 and nicknamed the Lunatic Express.

The national holidays have their own emoji: Jamhuri Day on 12 December (independence in 1963, the republic a year later) and Madaraka Day on 1 June (self-government in 1963) are 🇰🇪🎉🎆, and Mashujaa Day on 20 October honours the heroes of the independence struggle. Christmas 🎄 brings family trips "upcountry" to the home village, and Eid al-Fitr 🌙🕌 is a public holiday too, celebrated above all on the coast. Music is 🎶🎸🥁: benga, built on fast, bright guitar lines from Luo country, and the newer gengetone and Afrobeats of Nairobi. The Swahili everyone already knows makes the rest: Jambo!, Karibu (welcome), Asante sana (thank you very much) and Hakuna matata (no worries) 🦁.