The Role of Colonialism in Creating and Perpetuating Statelessness in Southern Africa most had never accessed, or had any desire to access, another citizenship that they hypothetically had rights to. The government was suspicious of farmworkers with foreign origins, based chiefly on their association with white farm owners.1 Many of these people were unaware that they had entitlement to other citizenships or were required to renounce them and failed to submit a declaration to the authorities as required. The 1979 Constitution also discriminated by gender, limiting the transfer of citizenship by birth to children born to Zimbabwean fathers or mothers if out of wedlock. Only foreign wives of Zimbabwean husbands were able to access citizenship. Women could not pass on citizenship to their children by non-Zimbabwean fathers or to their non-Zimbabwean husbands. Like the dual nationality debate, where the target was supposed to be ‘elite’ women with foreign husbands, poor rural women living in border regions were the most affected populations. The rise of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) as political opposition to ZANU-PF in 1999 led to more restrictions on both citizenship and voting rights. The subsequent decades were marked by state-sponsored violence and repression against political opponents to hold on to power.2 Hundreds of thousands of farmworkers of foreign descent were considered anti-government political opponents. Denationalisation formed part of a broader effort to disenfranchise people who might support opposition parties and prevent them from political participation. In January 2000, an estimated 30% of the two million farmworkers and their families who lived on commercial farms were of foreign descent.3 The government increased requirements on people with potential claims to foreign nationality, ratcheting up rules requiring people to submit a declaration renouncing potential citizenship. People then had to produce foreign documentation to establish that they were not entitled to citizenship, and the government imposed strict deadlines for submitting these documents. The majority of the people affected by these laws were people born or whose parents were born in neighbouring countries.4 The government wilfully established impossible requirements, even in the best of cases. In 2001, the Mozambican High Commission in Zimbabwe announced it was overwhelmed with applications and was unwilling to supply documentation proving people were not eligible for citizenship. The Malawian High Commission could not provide documents to people who were unable to provide sufficient detail — meaning they did not have enough documentation to renounce the citizenship to which they supposedly had a claim. Many people lost citizenship based on their inability to satisfy extremely difficult — and in some cases non-existent — criteria. It proved impossible for many to renounce what they had never possessed. Katinka Ridderbos ‘Stateless former farmworkers in Zimbabwe’ in Forced Migration Review (2009) FMR 32. Dewa Mavhinga ‘Reversing Zimbabwe’s Dismal Rights Record Since 1980’ Human Rights Watch 20 April 2020, available at www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/20/reversing-zimbabwes-dismal-rights-record-1980 3 Manby op cit note 32. 4 Ibid. 1 2 83