“All Nubians look at Kibera as the homeland of the Nubians… And there is no other place we consider home than Kibera”

In 1918, the British Government officially gazetted some 4197.9 acres of land as a military reserve. The Nubians had been living on that land since as early as 1904. They named it Kibra, which in Nubi means 'land of forest'. The military issued soldiers a license to live with their families on the land called a ‘shamba pass’. This allowed them to erect structures, graze cattle and grow food.

From 1915, the colonial government organised Africans into Native Reserves, based on their ethnic group, or tribe. Groups of Africans such as the Nubians who did not have a rural lifestyle or an identifiable ‘homeland’ in Kenya were categorized as 'detribalized natives'. After military service, and without a Native Reserve anywhere in Kenya or elsewhere, the Nubian soldiers had nowhere to go. Without the option of returning to Sudan, with which they had long since lost any connection, the colonial government allowed the Nubians to remain in their settlements, including Kibra.  Over the decades, the designation of ‘detribalized native’ came to be understood as indicating that certain groups, including the Nubians, were not native to Kenya and were ‘aliens’. This designation was used by the colonial government and has been used by successive Kenyan governments to exclude the Nubians from property rights to any communal land, including Kibra.

In 1950 the total population of Kibra was 3,000 people, more than half of which were Nubian. However, the size of the land was shrinking. Much of it had been taken over for European sporting clubs and housing. Beginning around the early 1960s and continuing into the early 1980s, large tracts of land were appropriated for middle class estates. Many Nubians were evicted from their homes, usually without any compensation. 

Rulings by the government after Kenya's independence changed Kibra's status to an 'unauthorized settlement' on State Land, rendering the inhabitants of Kibra, including the Nubians, squatters. Since the late 1970s, several hundred thousand Kenyans have moved to Nairobi in search of employment and were encouraged to settle in Kibra. This migration dramatically changed the face of Kibra, turning it into, Kibera, one of the largest slums in the world. Though the Nubians still consider Kibra their homeland, they are radically outnumbered and are still denied any claim to the land they have lived on for over 100 years.