HUSSAIN

Nubian youth (25)

A photocopy of your parents’ ID or a secondary school certificate and yourself, these are basically the only requirements for most Kenyans to get a National ID. But when somebody asks you for something beyond that, it means that this person is there to show you that you are actually not the person they really want. 

When I applied for my ID they wanted to see an affidavit that I’m actually a Kenyan. I had to pay some amount to get the affidavit, but I still did not get the ID. So I applied for a second time. I waited another seven months, and again it wasn’t issued.  So I applied for a third time.  When I went to apply the third time I applied in Luo land because I speak Luo fluently. But when they asked for my tribe, I told them I was Nubian. After giving them my school certificate and photocopy of my parents’ IDs, they asked me to present a death certificate for my grandfather. I didn’t have it.

Can you imagine someone asking you for something that you don’t have? Asking you to give some proof when you really don’t know how to prove it? My father is almost 60.  I didn’t know my grandfather.  When he died, I wasn’t even born. Back then, when people died, people just died. You were buried and that was it. You were gone. So here is someone asking me for something that I can never find. And when they are asking me this, knowing that I would never find the document, they are also trying to tell me in some other way, that I am not a Kenyan.

One of the necessities in Kenya is that to get a job, you must have an identity card.  An ID is one of the legal documents that you are supposed to present.  Maybe you are shortlisted for that interview, but you don’t have an ID and you think to yourself, You are not getting it. You think, It is over.  Your time is gone.  The opportunity that you had has already been taken away by somebody else.  

Nubians end up missing out on a lot of things because of this. And, there are a lot of other privileges that you can’t even fight for as a Nubian.  You can’t get them, especially if you aren’t even recognized as a community in Kenya.  I have my ID now, but it was painful to get this ID and to have someone tell me to go somewhere else.  To tell me to go back to Sudan, yet I was born in Kenya, bred in Kenya, educated in Kenya and now I’m looking for employment only in Kenya. I don’t know anywhere else.

When you are asked, “Can you name which tribe of Kenya you fall in?” You say you are a Nubian.  And they say, “Which one is that one?”

It means that your tribe is so marginalized that people don’t even know who you are. That you have been pushed down to the lowest levels, that you are not even known.  You are just there. People take that question to mean you are not a Kenyan.  There are communities in Kenya with only 3000 or 4000 people, and they are recognized. And yet here we are, thousands of Nubians, but nobody recongizes us or, those with power to recognize us are still finding it hard to consider us a community in Kenya.  You cannot be proud to be a citizen.  You can’t consider yourself as a citizen. 

I speak several different languages. What made me develop the aspiration of wanting to speak other languages from other tribes in Kenya?  Because I want to be recognized as someone from Kenya.  But why am I making these efforts?  I should be proud as a Nubian and as a Kenyan.  I should be proud to speak Nubian freely.  If someone speaks French or German in this country, once he speaks, his language is accepted as common as any ordinary Kenyan language.  But when I speak my language, someone will always say, “Hey what kind of language is this?  This is not from Kenya!” You feel intimidated. It can’t make you feel like saying, “I’m Kenyan.” 

We want to walk with pride.  We want to walk with our heads high.  We want to enjoy ourselves and interact freely. Inside Kibera, I can interact freely with everyone because everyone is living here. There are Luo. There are Kikuyu. There are Luhya.  People from all the tribes live in Kibera and everyone is forced to interact together. In Kibera, people know about the Nubians. But outside Kibera, it is different.  When I go outside Kibera, I have to present myself in a much different way so that people can accept me as a Kenyan.