One
of pride and not denigration (though the same did not happen
to indigène in French).
To a great extent this process was both necessary and positive.
The reclaiming of political and economic space sometimes went
further, however: beyond steps to create equality before the law
and to redress the economic and political inequalities that the
colonial era had created, to measures that excluded those who
had arrived in the wake of empire from the right to protection
by the new state at all. Some of the countries most affected by
migration created rules for membership that explicitly or implicitly denied citizenship to people whose parents had been
immigrants – but who themselves had been born in the country
and knew no other home. As ‘native’ became a positive label,
‘settler’ came to be a term of abuse.
Transitional rules were of course needed everywhere to cater
for the handover of legal authority from the colonial power
to the new states. Although international law is clear on the
basic principle that individuals who were ordinarily resident in
the former state become nationals of the new state, the rules
were in some cases written or rewritten to exclude those who
were asserted to have insufficient ‘historical’ connection to the
territory concerned. Many of the problems related to citizenship rights described in this book have their root causes in the
manipulation and exploitation of the rules that governed the
transition to independence. A number of states from the outset
aimed to exclude from citizenship those who could not claim an
ancestral link to the land; and several others amended their laws
in the years after independence to strengthen a racial or ethnic
element in the law. The detail of the dates at which a person’s
ancestor arrived in the country became of critical importance
to their rights today.
Thus, citizenship laws were written in many new African states
that introduced rules specifically designed to exclude recent
migrants from full citizenship rights; and in particular to exclude
the descendants of European and Asian immigrants from citizenship by birth, even if they might have the right to naturalize. In
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