One economic decline. The unexpected success of the opposition in a February 2000 constitutional referendum and June 2000 parliamentary elections led the ruling party to seek to disenfranchise the groups it most blamed for the results: white Zimbabweans, as well as around 200,000 farm workers working on white-owned farms. In 2001, the government amended the citizenship law to require those with a possible claim to another citizenship to renounce it under the relevant foreign law as well as under Zimbabwean law – even if they had never in fact held a passport or identity document from any other country but Zimbabwe. Surreal interactions ensued at the embassies of Malawi, Mozam­bique, Britain and other countries, where those whom the Zimbabwean government alleged had an entitlement to foreign citizenship tried to find a way to renounce a non-existent status. And in subsequent elections these alleged non-citizens found themselves unable to vote. In Sierra Leone, as in its neighbour Liberia, an economically advantaged group have found themselves excluded in a less ­dram­atic but similar way. The 1961 independence constitution of Sierra Leone followed the standard model for British colonies and created a single nationality without any distinction by race, ethnic group or sex. Within a year after independence, the constitutional provisions on citizenship were amended to insert a requirement that only a person ‘of negro African descent’ – defined as having a father or grandfather ‘of negro African descent’, thus adding gender to race discrimination – could be a citizen of the new country. Subsequent laws restricted the rights of non-citizens to acquire property or carry out certain businesses. The change to the law was directed against the less than 1 per cent of the country’s population known collectively as ‘Lebanese’, whose parents and grandparents settled in Sierra Leone from the Middle East. In particular, the motivation was to exclude Lebanese and mixed-race Sierra Leoneans from the right to contest for office in the 1962 elections. Although John Akar, a prominent Sierra Leonean whose mother was a black Sierra Leonean and father of Lebanese origin, argued in court 12