Kenya's North Eastern Province, the country's third-largest region, borders Somalia and is exclusively inhabited by ethnic Somalis. Following Kenya's independence 50 years ago, it emerged as a distinctive administrative entity.

Given to Kenya by British colonialists, the area has long been the site of ethnic tensions and violence targeting the Kenyan-Somali population - much of it ordered by Nairobi.

Economically strangled by Nairobi's political and military might, life there is a struggle.

Al Jazeera's Mohammed Adow is from this part of Kenya and has lived through the massacres and systematic intimidation by the Kenyan authorities.

For Not Yet Kenyan he goes back to see how the region and his people have come through the pogroms and started to prosper only to find that al-Shabab has established a stronghold in the region and is now throwing it into a new chapter of turmoil.