AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 8 No 3, SEP-DEC 2022 I. INTRODUCTION Since the beginning of known history, people moved throughout Southern Africa relatively freely in search of new territories and resources. Today, many Africans of African descent are not considered citizens by any country. They are stateless. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the international legal definition of a stateless person is ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’.1 Nationality is the legal bond between an individual and a state. This paper uses the terms nationality and citizenship interchangeably. It is the central right that determines how a country treats a person — the right to have rights. Stateless people do not have a nationality and are not entitled to other human rights. They struggle to access social services, healthcare, education, free movement, or political participation. They are among the world’s most vulnerable and are at high risk of exploitation, arbitrary detention, and expulsion.2 Statelessness has been described as a ‘forgotten’ issue — one of the most neglected areas of the global human rights agenda.3 Some people become stateless due to movement, while others are born stateless. Most stateless people remain in the country of their birth.4 Statelessness across Southern Africa is primarily linked to colonial histories, border changes, migration, gender, ethnic and religious discrimination, and poor civil registry systems.5 The nature of movement changed significantly under colonialism. European nations sent settlers and established government structures in the race to colonise the continent, farm the best land and extract the best resources. They drew and re-drew arbitrary borders, often through territories that had previously formed one political unit, established laws about who could move, and created tiered citizenship regimes that favoured the rights of settlers over native inhabitants.6 Native African inhabitants were told where they could and could not move and live and were used — often forcibly — to provide labour. Manby explains that colonialism in Southern Africa relied on native labour and established complex labour recruitment systems to build and manage colonial infrastructures. Under colonial conquest, authorities encouraged — even coerced and forced — labour migration, primarily to work on farms and mines. Throughout United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) ‘About statelessness’, available at https://www.unhcr.org/ ibelong/about-statelessness/ 2 Bronwen Manby ‘Citizenship and statelessness in the member states of the Southern African Development Community’ UNHCR (2020). 3 See the address by then UNHCR High Commissioner Antonio Guterres to Intergovernmental Meeting at Ministerial Level to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 50th anniversary of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness held in Geneva, Switzerland, 7 December 2011, available at www. unhcr.org/admin/hcspeeches/4ecd0cde9/statement-mr-antonio-guterres-united-nations-high-commissioner-refugees. html 4 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Emergency Handbook Stateless person definition, available at https://emergency.unhcr.org/entry/52865/stateless-person-definition 5 Liesl H Muller ‘Legal identity for all – ending statelessness in SADC’ in Southern Africa Litigation Centre Goal 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals: Perspectives from Judges and Lawyers in Southern Africa on Promoting Rule of Law and Equal Access to Justice (2016). 6 Bronwen Manby ‘Statelessness in Southern Africa’ UNHCR (2011), available at https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/50c1f9562.pdf 1 76