Kibera

This guide to Kibera in Nairobi opens with Hussein Dong recalling his grandfather, Deyeb Aljab, one of the Sudanese soldiers recruited into the King's African Rifles in the eighteen nineties. It traces how colonial officers, lacking a pension fund, paid these veterans in forest land around nineteen oh four, land the Nubians named Kibra. Independence-era Kenya reclassified the settlement as unauthorised in nineteen sixty-three, even as Nubian families kept renting out plots here for two generations.