YUSUF

Nubian elder

All Nubians look at Kibera as the homeland of the Nubians.  Having come here more than perhaps 120 or 130 years ago, we lost all connection with the original country, which is Sudan. And there is no other place we consider home than Kibera.

The land used to be very beautiful.  Green. Looking very fertile.  We grew a lot of food from our shamba and we had several other plots from which to cultivate. There were streams running throughout the year with clean water. In fact, as boys we learned how to swim in the rivers that ran through Kibera.  Every time it rained the quantity of the water in the streams increased and that would be a very beautiful time to swim, even do a bit of fishing at the extreme end of Kibera where there is the Nairobi dam. We had a lot of trees where as boys you could hunt for birds and rabbits. And there was a lot of wildlife in Kibera. Small game, like antelopes, hare and rabbits, would be seen running around.

But besides the land itself, the good thing was that there was a lot of harmony in the life of people here. Life actually used to be good and one would not feel alienated so much from the rest of the Kenyan community, because a lot of people in Kenya lived in the same kind of rural setting.

There were a lot of open fields and grazing land but the change has been very rapid in the last 30 years or so.  A lot of rural urban migration occurred after independence, but not so fast in the early years of independence as in the last 30 years.  In fact, Kibera bears the brunt of the rural urban migration being an area that still has not been clearly surveyed and properly registered as land belonging to the people who have settled on it for more than 100 years.  But now,

…the unfortunate thing is that everybody who has anything to do with Kibera looks at it as one huge slum and the history of the original community tends to get lost in the process.

I know that Nubians identify themselves as citizens of Kenya.  The problem is when it comes to dealing with other communities or with government officials.  The difficulties start there.  For the youth, it was a big problem to get an ID card, yet this document is a standard document that identifies a person as living within Kenya and of Kenyan citizenship, and it opens other avenues, for example, if I was to consider getting employment, or higher education, it would be necessary to have this document. Opening a bank account, for example, having a pin number, there are many transactions that one cannot do unless you have an ID.  If such people get married, it would be difficult for them to get a marriage certificate because these are all documents that need to be processed after having an ID. 

As to being registered as being the 43rd tribe of Kenya and whether this would actually give us more or less automatic recognition as citizens of Kenya, that may not quite be so because actually, it is a change of attitude that is required for other Kenyan communities to look at us as fellow Kenyans.

My own community was one of the first African communities to actually establish itself in Nairobi and many of the services that were started for Nairobi before it became a city, like the bus services and the city council of Nairobi, many of these services were actually manned by people in the Nubian community. It then becomes strange that 30 or 50 or 60 years later, this community is still looked at as an alien community.

Having to live in an area or a place that is considered a slum, one that does not even appear on maps as a settled area, this creates a problem.  If that were not the case, I think we would have had a chance to advance our cultural identity even more.  And that would have been a big boost to the community.  Because, a community becomes confident when it is recognized by other communities.