Passports
The President's Passport, Lost in a Plane Crash — Found 30 Years Later in a Kenyan Village
In 1993, a plane went down in rural Kenya carrying South Sudan's future president. His passport was recovered from the wreckage by villagers — and kept safe for three decades.
"The passport, together with those belonging to other occupants of the aircraft, had been safely kept by a family that also collected armlets from the scene of the accident."
In 1993, a chartered plane carrying six people — including a young Salva Kiir, now president of South Sudan — went down in Torongo, Baringo County, Kenya. One passenger, a Briton, died on the spot. The pilot and two Norwegian medics on board sustained injuries severe enough that both use wheelchairs today. Kiir and his bodyguard survived and were carried out by truck.
Villagers who reached the crash site first didn't just pull survivors from the wreckage — they collected what was left behind: passports, armlets, personal effects from a plane that had just fallen out of the sky in their backyard. And then, for thirty years, a local family simply kept it all.
In 2023, the survivors and a South Sudanese government delegation returned to the crash site to meet the families of the people who'd saved their lives three decades earlier. The passports — Kiir's included — were formally returned. South Sudan's government announced it would fund a trauma center at a nearby hospital, named for the president, in the community's honor.
Thirty years is an extraordinary length of time for a lost document to simply wait, undisturbed, for the right moment to go home.
A president's passport, kept for 30 years by the family who saved his life.