Bronwen Manby Asians in East Africa; ‘Lebanese’ from the French middle eastern mandate territories in AOF (Ghai and Ghai, 1965; Arsan, 2014). And then there was the need to separate nationals (of the relevant colonial power) and ‘aliens’ (whether European or ‘native’); or internal migrants (forced or voluntary) within a common imperial space: thus in the British territories legal definitions distinguished ‘natives’ from ‘native foreigners’, entailing different rights and obligations. The mixed race children of empire – largely of European men and (coerced) African women – created particular anxiety among the classifiers of status who had to decide which system of law to apply and on what basis to make distinctions (whether of ‘blood’ or degree of ‘assimilation’) (Barrera, 2004; Lee, 2005; Saada, 2007). This categorisation reached its notorious apogee in South Africa (Breckenridge, 2014). In the British territories designated ‘protectorates’ the fiction was established, through the concept of ‘indirect rule’, that Africans continued to be governed by their own ‘tribal authorities’, as recognised (or imposed) by the British and falling under British ‘protection’. In the territories designated ‘colonies’, governed directly from Britain (of which some became self-governing ‘Dominions’), all those born in the territory became ‘British subjects’ (after 1948 renamed ‘citizens of the UK and colonies’), theoretically with the same status as a person of British descent born in Britain. Yet the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914 provided that nothing could prevent the government of any ‘British Possession’ from ‘treating differently different classes of British subjects’ (Karatani, 2002). Africans in these territories might be treated as British subjects (albeit subject to discrimination of other kinds) if they ever reached Britain, but in South Africa, Southern Rhodesia, or Kenya they were confined to ‘native reserves’, excluded from many civil and all political rights, and subject to tight controls on freedom of movement policed by the requirement to carry a ‘pass’. In the French territories, racial subordination was effected by legal distinctions between French citizens (citoyens français), who enjoyed full civil and political rights, and French subjects (sujets français) (Cooper, 2014). With the exception of residents of the famous quatre communes of Senegal (the four oldest colonial towns in AOF, whose residents were given full French citizenship in 1848), the status of French citizen was only attainable by showing adoption of French customs and renunciation of religious or customary civil status. Similar distinctions existed in the Belgian, Portuguese and Italian territories (Manby, 2018, chap. 3). Only in the final years of colonial rule did a small number of western-educated and urban black Africans come together to demand – with some success – civil rights under the rule of law the colonisers claimed to apply, and even some extension of political rights (Ibhawoh, 2002; Cooper, 2012a). The independence struggles for citizenship (in its participatory sense) were in large part configured by this contest between the European authorities and these African elites, by the different administrative arrangements of the colonial powers, and by the size and degree of resistance from the European settler population in each territory. So long as the primary adversary was the colonial state, however, the relationship between the leaders of the independence movements and other residents of the colonial territories – or other forms of leadership – remained largely untested. Decolonisation and the Challenge of ‘Nation-building’ The OAU decision to respect colonial borders confirmed the task of moulding the former colonial units into political communities. The new states, presumptively democracies from their establishment, faced an acute version of the conundrum that ‘the democratic legitimacy of decisions affecting the boundaries of a “demos” (i.e. those citizens who are eligible to participate in democratic selfgovernment) presupposes that the demos by whom or on whose behalf a decision is taken is already composed in a way that makes its boundaries legitimate’ (Bauböck, 2017, p. 61). Even at the practical level, those creating the first electoral rolls struggled to determine eligibility to vote when so many held no official identification documents of any kind (Cooper, 2012b; Willis, Lynch and Cheeseman, 2018). 5 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies