The complications of this argument illustrate the difficulty of basing citizenship rights on the playground principle of ‘I was here first’. The reality is that in today’s globalized world millions of people can trace ancestry to two or more different locations. Sometimes those locations are thousands of kilometres apart across the ocean; sometimes just the other side of a political border created for the first time a century or a decade ago. Many people of African descent are fighting for their rights to be fully acknowledged as citizens in the countries that previously colonized Africa. Beyond citizenship law 21 Introduction The stories told in this book are partial histories, of course: the issues at stake in the civil wars in Congo and Côte d’Ivoire, in the old-fashioned interstate clash between Eritrea and Ethiopia, or in the discrimination against Europeans, Lebanese or Asians in Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Uganda are not restricted to the legal definition of who is a citizen of the states concerned. Citizenship law has been used as a tool to get at issues of economic and political power: control of land, commercial opportunities and public office. Extreme violence and discrimination are possible without any abuse of citizenship law to support their deployment, as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda shows. Marginalized groups can be excluded from effective exercise of citizenship rights even if their right to legal citizenship in itself is not contested, notably in the case of individuals subjected to slavery or its contemporary variations, or ethnic groups following a different lifestyle from the national norm, including nomads such as pastoralists or hunter-gatherers. The application of citizenship law may reflect as much as reinforce these and other deep-seated cultural beliefs or prejudices that exclude individuals from full participation in a community; perhaps most obviously in the case of gender discrimination. There is a vast literature on the nature of nationalism and nation-building, identity, race, ethnicity, gender, autochthony and the politics of belonging, both in Africa and worldwide,