Kenyan Nubians and the struggle for acceptance
Emma Nzioka | NATION Nubian children perform a traditional dance. Youths from the community usually have to go through a process called “vetting” where they are required to prove their connections to Kenya through documents like grand parents’ birth certificates before they can get a national identification card. Until recently, the whole process used to be supervised by a “vetting committee” in the Registrar of Persons Office.
Posted Thursday, December 15 2011 at 18:00
In Summary
- In Nairobi’s Kibera slums live thousands of marginalised Kenyans whose ancestors were brought to Kenya from Sudan in the early 1890s to serve as soldiers in the British Army. Although they gave their all to the British empire under the Kings African Rifles service during the building of the Uganda Railway and later in the First and Second World Wars, their uneasy relationship with the colonial masters boiled over into independent Kenya. Now they want an end to the iniquities that include a deliberate attempt not to recognise Kibera as their ancestral home
Sitting outside the battered door to his old family house in the Makina sector of Kibera slums, Hussain gazes at the setting sun as he ponders what the future holds for him.
Unlike the fading sunshine that is guaranteed to grace the skies over the world famous shantytown the next day, the 25-year-old’s tomorrow is clouded in uncertainty.
With no national identity card to quantify his citizenship, no college certificate or a godfather in high places, the young man’s destiny looks as gloomy as the rapidly approaching darkness.
Like Hussain, the fate of thousands of Nubian youths residing in Kibera and other places across the country hangs precariously in the ethnic balance.
“When I went to apply (for the ID) the third time, I indicated that I’m a Luo because I speak Dholuo fluently. After giving them my school certificate and photocopies of my parents’ IDs, they asked me to present the death certificate of my grandfather,” he says.
“I have never met my grandfather. When he died I wasn’t even born. Back then when people died, no one bothered about certificates and all that nonsense. That is why it does not make sense for someone to ask me for such things. I think they just want to deny me citizenship”.
Without an identity card, one is virtually a non-entity in Kenya because they cannot get employment, buy property or transact any official business.
Nubian youths usually have to go through a process called “vetting” where they are required to prove their connections to Kenya through documents like grand parents’ birth certificates before they could get an ID. Until recently, the whole process used to be supervised by a “vetting committee” in the Registrar of Persons Office
“At the age of 18, your life as a Kenyan stops,” one youth from Kibera laments. “It is only when you apply for an ID card that your realise you have been living a lie. This country does not want you and the years you have spent here are all a farce.”
When they finally get the cards, sometimes after waiting for up to three years, landing a job proves even more difficult.
“You have to have someone to introduce you to people who matter,” says Hussain. “But we have no one in politics, no one in government, no one in high places places… we are doomed.”
But the Nubians’ quest to change their status from “nowhere people” — a term used to refer to stateless communities — to recognition received a boost last week after American freelance photographer Greg Constantine compiled a pictorial book entitled Kenya’s Nubians, Then & Now.
Published in conjunction with United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the book documents the community’s history in photos, personal testimonies and a recount of important dates.
“My motivation for compiling this book was because very little is known about the Nubians despite the fact that the area that they live in has been heavily documented,” Constantine explained during the book’s launch a the pricey Lord Errol Restaurant, Nairobi. “The project also helped me in pushing the agenda of stateless people in Africa”.
The book, expected to be in bookstores across Kenya by January next year, was part of a bigger project called the Nowhere People where Constantine highlights the plight of stateless people in Africa and Asia through photography.
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