Objectives of the Department
General objectives
1. To provide students and the public skills in interpreting the unfolding human record.
2. To contribute to moral understanding of our nation through learning the patriotic and unpatriotic actions in the past.
3. To develop an awareness of the nature of Kenya’s diversity and foster a sense of belonging and contributing to society.
4. To impart knowledge and skills for assessing evidence, conflicting interpretations, and arguments to make sense of world, African and Kenyan history.
5. To develop student’s individual academic and personal character that promotes inclusion, understanding and empathy.
Strategic Objectives
1. To manage academic programmes with in-built globally acceptable quality standards, good practices and systems as well as rationalize courses and programmes to align the goals of the Department into the growth of the University of Nairobi as a centre global of excellence.
2. To develop an appropriate bottom-up governance system unique to the needs, social environment and real situation in the Department in which participatory approach to issues, collegiality and comradery prevail.
3. To strengthen existing and develop new global, regional and local networks, partnerships and linkages in order to raise the Department’s profile, financial status and impeachable competency in scholarship, knowledge dissemination and service to community.
Philosophy of the Department
Knowing and understanding a people’s history is liberating. History is the inescapable trajectory of humankind on which the workings of the world are unravelled, an empowering journey of discovery. This journey of engagement, remembering, discovering, and rediscovering centres the learner and the public as the focus of the department and for which it prides itself. Ours is to go beyond acquisition of past information based on the idea of a utilitarian “saleable” past but allow for deeper appreciation of historical knowledge production and dissemination for posterity.
Rationale of the Department
The study of history is useful and vital to Society. It is essential for the individual and to society and has an aesthetic to behold. History is an entry to the laboratory of human experience and when studied reasonably well, people acquire some useful habits of mind as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our lives, emerging with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. From the formulation of laws and theories to institutional or community development to individual growth, entails a lookback at a people’s history. The department is therefore the citadel space for acquiring skills to produce wholistic beings and an informed public knowledgeable of the nation’s past and lessons learnt thereof to inform future actions.