How statelessness leaves the Nubian community vulnerable to displacement
By Lomle Salama
In Kibera, multi-storied apartment blocks now tower over what residents once knew as forest. For Kenya’s Nubians, these concrete structures represent not urban renewal but the final chapter in a 140-year story of displacement. “Kibera wasn’t always like this,” says one resident whose family has occupied the same plot for over a century. “To be from Kibera meant that you were Nubian. Now, to be from Kibera means that you are from a slum.”
The Nubian predicament exposes a troubling reality about African urbanisation. As governments pursue development targets under SDG 10 and 11, meant to reduce inequality and build sustainable cities, the communities most in need of protection find themselves squeezed out. Infrastructure trumps identity. Progress displaces people.
A century of non-existence
Kenya’s Nubians are descendants of up to 100,000 Sudanese soldiers forcibly conscripted by British colonial forces in the early 1900s. After serving in the King’s African Rifles during both World Wars, they were denied repatriation. The British settled them on 4,197 acres outside Nairobi in 1917, which the soldiers named Kibra, meaning forest in Nubian. Yet colonial authorities crucially never formalised their land rights.
Following independence in 1963, successive Kenyan governments refused to recognise Nubians as citizens. Abdul Faraj, a community leader, describes this as a denial of their “right to existence”. The discrimination became systematic. Nubians remained the only non-border ethnic group forced through a lengthy vetting process to obtain national identity cards. Without these documents, employment, education, healthcare and banking services became inaccessible.
Korir Sing’Oei, a legal scholar who documented the community’s struggles, notes the profound injustice: “The Nubian story has taught me that it is possible to be a long term resident of a state and yet be denied the right to citizenship and property.”
This bureaucratic violence had devastating effects. In government census processes, Nubians were categorised as “others” whilst Kenya’s 42 recognised ethnic groups received formal acknowledgement. The late Yusuf Ali, former chair of the Nubian Council of Elders, observed how this denial forced young Nubians to self-identify as belonging to dominant groups to secure employment allocated on ethnic quotas. “To feel always discriminated against, or to be reminded that you came from Sudan, is not a very good thing for young people growing up, who want to feel they belong to this country,” he said.
When upgrading means eviction
The Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme, launched with UN-Habitat in 2003, aimed to improve housing for 5.3 million slum dwellers. What it delivered was displacement by another name. In Kibera, where Nubians constituted 95 per cent of residents in 1964, demographics shifted dramatically. By 2023, Nubians had become a minority in their ancestral homeland, their numbers diluted by deliberate political and economic pressures.
The programme’s housing units sell for between 400,000 and 900,000 Kenyan shillings. Yet 70 per cent of adult Nubians remain unemployed. Twelve per cent of Nubian households report zero income, with another 40 per cent earning less than $60 monthly. The mathematics are brutal: even the cheapest units represent nearly seven years of total household income for most Nubian families.
Evidence from elsewhere confirms a pattern. In Mombasa, 520 tenants were evicted from Buxton estate for a housing project that was supposed to serve the poor. According to Haki Yetu, an NGO that documented the case, 90 per cent of the evictees moved to other slums, unable to afford the new units. Meanwhile, developers received 90 per cent of the completed housing, with Mombasa County Government getting just 10 per cent.
President William Ruto’s 2023 announcement that Kibera would be transformed into a modern residential area within ten years sent tremors through the community. The statement came with no consultation, no mention of how families earning less than a dollar per person daily would afford market-rate housing, no acknowledgement of cultural heritage at stake.
Beatrice Oriyo, a 34-year-old mother of three living in a single room with no private toilet, captured the gulf between policy and reality. When asked about playgrounds for her children, she laughed: “There’s nothing like that here. We don’t even have our own toilet. We bathe in the same room that is our kitchen, living room and bedroom. The idea of a playground here is like a joke.”
A legal victory, hollow in practice
The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights ruled in Kenya’s favour in 2015, finding that discriminatory vetting procedures violated the African Charter. The Commission recommended the government recognise Nubian land rights through security of tenure.
In June 2017, President Uhuru Kenyatta issued a community land title for 288 acres to the Nubian community trust. Sheikh Issa Abdulfaraj, chairman of the Council of Elders, received it at State House. The Council said: “The Nubian community is elated, and we appreciate the commitment of President Kenyatta to right this long-running injustice.”
Yet the victory proved illusory. The title covered less than 7 per cent of the territory Nubians historically occupied. Development pressures continued unabated. James A. Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, which supported the legal case, acknowledged both the achievement and its limits: “It is vital that the whole Nubian community participates in this process.”
They have not participated. Research on similar upgrading schemes across Africa reveals why residents view such projects with suspicion. Studies found that many Kibera residents allocated new housing units rented them to wealthier tenants at four or five times the subsidised rate, then moved back to the slum with cash in their pockets. The units solved nothing. Families needed income, not apartments they could not afford to live in.
According to Urban ARK research, Kibera has seen three upgrading projects since 2004. None significantly improved residents’ lives. The main reasons: corruption, poor management, and lack of consultation with residents. UN-Habitat’s programme, which relocated 1,200 families to high-rise units, faced lawsuits from residents claiming unfair allocations.
The heritage calculus
Target 11.4 of the Sustainable Development Goals explicitly calls for strengthening efforts to protect cultural heritage. Yet development initiatives consistently prioritise physical infrastructure over intangible cultural assets. For the Nubians, heritage is not nostalgic preservation. It is survival infrastructure.
The Nubian language, Islamic religious practices and collective memory of military service create bonds enabling mutual support networks, informal credit systems and collective advocacy. “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, creates a problem,” Yusuf Ali said. “If this 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.”
Displacement severs these connections. Decantment sites place families far from their communities during construction, destroying the social networks essential for survival in informal economies. A 17-year-old who works for Slums Going Green and Clean, a waste recycling organisation, lives adjacent to sewage canals yet maintains meticulous order in his home. “Yes, my home is organised because I believe if my home is organised, my future will be too,” he says. That optimism cannot survive forced relocation to unfamiliar areas where community ties do not exist.
Recent scholarship on development indicators shows how poorly conventional metrics capture these losses. SDG 10 focuses primarily on income distribution and discriminatory laws. It inadequately addresses how seemingly neutral development policies systematically disadvantage minorities. The absence of ethnicity-disaggregated data in many African countries masks differential impacts, allowing governments to claim progress towards targets whilst specific communities sink deeper into marginalisation.
The larger pattern
The Nubian case is not unique. Across Africa, similar communities face identical pressures. The Ogiek displaced from Kenya’s Mau Forest, San populations removed from Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve, and countless others experience development as a mechanism of dispossession.
In Nairobi, 60 per cent of the population now lives in informal settlements, up from historical levels. Kenya’s slum upgrading programmes have run for two decades. The expansion of informal housing suggests these programmes address symptoms whilst structural inequalities deepen.
According to the World Bank, the average Nairobian earns less than 30,000 shillings monthly, an income insufficient to service any mortgage scheme, even for low-cost housing. Rents in Kibera range from 2,000 to 5,000 shillings monthly. Low-cost housing in areas like Umoja costs roughly 7,000 shillings per month. For someone earning 20,000 shillings, the difference is impossible to bridge after accounting for food, transport and school fees.
President Ruto has made affordable housing central to his government’s agenda, announcing plans to construct 250,000 houses annually. “Realising that more than half of Kenya’s population will live in urban areas by 2050, we have integrated universal housing as a critical pillar of the national bottom-up economic transformation agenda,” he told delegates at the UN-Habitat Assembly. The financing mechanism, a 3 per cent levy on employee salaries with matching employer contributions, has sparked protests from labour unions. For workers already struggling, an additional 3 per cent deduction solves nothing.
Research on cost recovery in slum upgrading puts the challenge in perspective. A 2024 study estimated that transforming 2.38 square kilometres of Kibera would require €602 million to €641 million, approximately €2,408 per capita. That figure is insignificant compared to Western standards but astronomical for households earning less than $2 daily.
What would work
The Nubian experience offers clear lessons. First, legal recognition of land rights must precede infrastructure projects. Community land titles provide foundations for negotiation, ensuring residents participate as stakeholders rather than subjects.
Second, development initiatives require cultural impact assessments alongside environmental and economic analyses. These should identify heritage assets, document social networks and design interventions preserving community cohesion.
Third, financing mechanisms need fundamental restructuring to match actual income levels. Cross-subsidisation models, where market-rate units fund below-cost housing, offer one approach. Community land trusts, separating ownership of land from housing, provide another mechanism for maintaining affordability.
Fourth, representation matters. Meaningful participation requires structured decision-making authority for affected communities, transparent disclosure of financial arrangements and accountability mechanisms when outcomes diverge from objectives.
The Mukuru slum upgrading programme in Nairobi shows what is possible when residents lead. Through Akiba Masinani Trust, SDI Kenya and Muungano wa Wanavijiji, households were organised into cells. The Special Planning Area covers 689 acres and a population of 402,000 in over 100,000 households. Before upgrading, 3,863 poorly maintained toilets serviced the entire population, one toilet for every 103 residents. Today, over 50 kilometres of roads are under construction, with each plot connected to electricity, clean water and the sewerage network.
Success depends on two hidden investments. First, residents themselves resisted evictions, articulated demands and built accountable organisations, with women playing leading roles. Second, organisations received long-term financial support from international donors including Misereor, Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and Swedish Sida. This enabled sustained community organising rather than project-based interventions.
An unfinished reckoning
In March 2025, President Ruto told Muslims gathered for an Iftar at State House that Nubians would be formally recognised as Kenya’s 43rd tribe by Madaraka Day or Jamhuri Day. “Our Nubian brothers and sisters are solid members of the Kenyan society,” he said. “They are going to be mainstreamed into the Kenya community.”
Recognition without restitution changes little. More than 99 per cent of Nubians in Kenya identify themselves as Kenyan, according to surveys. The government thinks otherwise. After 140 years, formal acknowledgement of their existence represents progress. Yet acknowledgement does not return confiscated land, does not rebuild severed community networks, does not compensate for generations locked out of economic participation.
The concrete towers rising in Kibera will house residents. Whether those residents include Nubian families who have called this land home for more than a century depends on choices being made now. Those choices will determine whether Africa’s urban future includes space for diverse communities comprising its social fabric, or whether development becomes another chapter in a long history of displacement.
For the Nubians, the question is urgent and simple: can development serve justice, or will it merely modernise exclusion?
