Kenya: We lived like ghosts before we got IDs — Shona community members

by AKELLO ODENYO and CHRISTINE NTINYARI

“We were alive and dead at the same time, like ghosts, because we had no identity.”

Those were the words of Zephaniah Muungani, a member of the Shona community living in Kenya.

“Generation after another; statelessness and the misery that comes with it were all that the offspring of a Shona could inherit,” she said.

For years, the Shona lived as a stateless community in Kenya until July 28, 2021, when the government issued them with national identity cards.