including the right to vote or stand for office or be appointed an
official, only in some other country that they have never seen.
Politically disenfranchised, there is no demonstration of loyalty
that can satisfy the requirements of the law.
This injustice is multiplied by a gender inequality in the law
which still in many countries disallows women who marry noncitizens from passing their own citizenship to their children or
their husband, though men can do so without question. The
victims of this sort of discrimination are mostly invisible in the
media, because they are dispersed throughout wider populations, yet those affected must number in the millions across
the continent.
Citizenship law in Africa: a history of discrimination and
exclusion
3
Introduction
Africa’s ‘artificial’ borders are often blamed for Africa’s wars.
The borders of all the African states, even those that were not
themselves colonized, were set by European colonial powers;
most of them during the notorious Berlin conference of 1884–85
that marked the end of the ‘Scramble for Africa’. In 1964 the
Organization of African Unity (OAU), the club of Africa’s newly
independent states, decided to stick with these borders and not
renegotiate them. There has been much discussion about the
wisdom of this decision, and whether the leaders of the newly
independent countries should rather have aimed to redesign
African borders along more ‘natural’ lines: that is, along lines that
followed boundaries of language and ethnicity and pre-colonial
political structures, rather than being set with ruler and map by
people thousands of miles away who had never seen the land
they were dividing up.
Borders throughout the world have been established by war
and conquest, and Africa is unusual rather in the abruptness of
the transition than in the arbitrariness of the outcome. Yet the
rapidity both of the creation of African colonies and of the winning of independence from the late 1950s at the end of less than a
century of European rule meant that the leaders who took control