The Role of Colonialism in Creating and Perpetuating Statelessness in Southern Africa conferring citizenship to their children.19 Madagascar fell under international pressure, including being subjected to Universal Periodic Review by the Human Rights Council. The review included recommendations from several countries, including Germany, Spain, Brazil, and the United States, who called on Madagascar to ‘reform its nationality law to ensure that all citizens have equal right to confer nationality to their children and the children born to citizen mothers are no longer at risk of statelessness’. Madagascar, along with Sierra Leone, became the first country since the launch of the UNHCR #IBelong campaign in 2014 to eliminate gender discrimination in its laws. In 2016, Madagascar promulgated a new nationality law that removed gender discrimination regarding the conferral of nationality to children. Since 2017, children born to either a Malagasy mother or father are to be recognized as citizens. The law also has retroactive application, so that children born before the reform are covered by it. By April 2018, 1,361 families had benefitted from the law. However, the law still prohibits Malagasy women from passing their nationality to their spouses while men are able to pass their nationality on to their wives.20 The 2017 amendment to bring gender quality to the nationality law in Madagascar is a welcome change. The UNHCR has labelled it an ‘encouraging and important step in preventing and reducing statelessness’.21 Despite this progress in gender equality, Madagascar has not addressed its ongoing Karana situation and its continued denial of citizenship rights. There are no signs to date of improvement for the Karana people. V. CONTEMPORARY EXPRESSIONS OF EXCLUSION Since colonialism, exclusionary politics have been the mainstay of African politics.22 To claim and maintain power and build wealth, colonial powers manufactured political and social boundaries and established the use of designated political ‘insiders’, ‘outsiders’, and ‘foreigners’ to dehumanise and exclude.23 The distinctions of who constitutes each category have evolved and changed since colonialism and white minority rule, but the practice of manufacturing political and social boundaries entrenched under colonialism remains in place. In each of the case studies above, post-colonial powers have continued — and even expanded — these practices of exclusion to achieve different ends. The Durban Declaration of 2001 recognises that ‘colonialism has led to racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent … and indigenous peoples were victims of colonialism and continue to be victims of its consequences’. It further notes that colonial theories Equal Rights Trust op cit note 56. Focus Development Association op cit note 53. Aikomus op cit note 54. 22 Klaas op cit note 8. 23 Paddy O’Halloran ‘Colonial xenophobia and fear of “foreign” politics in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony: Implications for analyzing borderless politics today in S O Abidde & E K Matambo (eds) Xenophobia, Nativism and PanAfricanism in 21st Century Africa, available at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-82056-5_6 19 20 21 89