Monday, August 3, 2009

The Supposed Kenyan Birth Certificate

The Supposed Kenyan Birth Certificate

This supposed Kenyan birth certificate should be utterly devastating. Let's just say that I am going to need some serious proof that it isn't a forgery. But one of the criticisms by Don Surber is just wrong:

He was born in 1961. There was no Republic of Kenya then. Kenya was a colony.

It did not become independent until he was 2 years old.
A search for the phrase "Republic of Kenya" in books and documents published in 1961 and earlier finds hundreds of examples. It appears that the colonial government used that term in treaties, etc. Full independence from Britain followed a period when Kenya was nominally a republic in the British Commonwealth.

UPDATE: A reader points out that some of the documents in that list were actually published after 1961. The books.google.com engine uses the publication date of the first volume in a serial set--so a number of these items that were returned by a search by date were actually well after 1961.

In any case, the supposed birth certificate was apparently printed in 1964, several years after the supposed birth, and could well have said "Republic of Kenya" on it. I don't know that this is a real birth certificate. It may well be a fraud. But the presence of "Republic of Kenya" on it doesn't preclude it being real.

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