Post-colonial Citizenship and Decolonisation as a Turning Point: Continuities and Discontinuities in African states A very large literature has dealt with the challenges of ‘nation-building’ in the absence of an easily grasped ‘usable past’ of nationhood (Ranger, 1976), both in the immediate aftermath of independence (for example, Zolberg, 1967) and more recently (two comparative collections are: Dorman, Hammett and Nugent, 2007; and Hunter, 2016). The invention of post-colonial state and nationhood required, in principle, the jettisoning of the layered statuses of both the colonial and the pre-colonial past, in favour of a conceptually unified and equal membership status (Lonsdale, 2016). Yet, as the glow of independence faded, ‘movements from below resisted and repudiated the majoritarian, homogenizing, and exclusionary tendencies that appeared embedded in the structure of the nationstate’ (Getachew, 2019, p. 179). Many commentators have focused on the resurgence of ‘primordial’ identities and ‘neo-patrimonial’ politics after the euphoria of the post-independence period (for surveys of this literature, see Lentz, 1995; Bach, 2011; Mkandawire, 2015). Traditional leadership institutions (even where largely invented by the colonial state) refused to wither away, adapting and evolving to remain important intermediaries between state and citizens. As democratisation and decentralisation following the end of the Cold War revitalised the pull of autochthony or indigeneity, the idea of national citizenship, previously ‘a very icon of modernity’ was itself called into question (Geschiere, 2009, p. 24). There is a great deal of agreement that the colonial creation of ‘two publics’, of citizens and of subjects, with (presumed) loyalties to the nation-state and the ethnic group, is somewhere at the heart of these challenges (Ekeh, 1975; Mamdani, 1996). Some thus argued that Africa should ‘liberate the post-colonial state by creating new consensual political entities’ based on the pre-colonial order (wa Mutua, 1995, p. 1166), or recognise the reality of disintegrating and dysfunctional African states by greater ‘experimentation with regard to new states’ (Herbst, 2001, p. 266). Others called for the ‘gradual dismantlement of the nation-statist legacy derived from imperialism’ and the introduction of more regionalist frameworks (Davidson, 1992, p. 321). These visions have not proved feasible. In practice, the only new states that have gained international recognition since independence from colonial rule have been based on colonial boundaries. Attempts to argue that the right of self-determination established in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights applied within the colonial borders, and not only to freedom from colonial rule, have been dismissed by the African Commission with the view that self-determination must be accomplished in a variant ‘compatible with the sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of the existing states (Katangese Peoples’ Congress v. Zaire, 1995). Others have emphasised that the colonial boundaries now have real meaning and have, in fact, created national communities, however fragile (Herbst, 2001, chap. 8; Dorman, Hammett and Nugent, 2007, p. 22; Bøås and Dunn, 2013, p. 33). Even in extreme circumstances ‘states may entirely collapse without disappearing as nations in the social imaginary’ (Young, 2007, p. 241). Thus, it is argued that citizenship theory should move beyond the dichotomy between African traditions and Western modernities, to ‘accommodate a new set of societal tensions’ induced by sub-national identifications, migration, economic reforms and democratic transitions (Halisi, Kaiser and Ndegwa, 1998). We can, moreover, see these tensions played out in the sphere of citizenship law. The Role of Citizenship Law in Defining the Nation at Independence The citizenship laws adopted at independence abolished the racial hierarchies of membership that had been defined by the colonial era, and established a legal regime of equal rights. Yet the application of the principles of non-discrimination and equal citizenship was in tension with the desire to overturn the legacy of decades – or centuries – of political control and economic exploitation by external powers. Discrimination on the basis of sex in transmission of citizenship to children and spouses remained the norm, as it was across the globe in the 1960s. European University Institute 6