AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 8 No 3, SEP-DEC 2022 and creating distinctions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ has remained using new classifications of protectionism against ‘others’. Nationality has become an increasingly important tool for classifying people. People who come from or have links outside of a country are increasingly viewed as ‘others’ or ‘outsiders’. Migration has become criminalised, and blurred distinctions between ‘legal’ and illegal migration have become entrenched in political and media narratives. Politicians have homed in on these exclusionary practices as an expedient political tool. Political exclusion is the ‘easiest’ way to stay in power in the short term, even if it creates long-term instability.9 This paper explores colonialism’s role in modern-day statelessness in Southern Africa. It examines the cases of South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Madagascar to show how the colonial legacies founded on exclusionary practices and defining ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ are creating and perpetuating statelessness. It explores how, in postcolonialism, each of these countries leverages nationality as a form of ‘othering’ to achieve slightly different ends. In Zimbabwe, statelessness is used as a form of political repression; in South Africa, to deter irregular migration and even asylum-seeking; and in Madagascar, as an enduring form of ethnic and religious discrimination. It warns that these exclusionary practices risk increasing and intensifying statelessness and that the costs, while often invisible to the general public, greatly outweigh any perceived benefits. II. METHODOLOGY This paper is based on a literature review of existing publications on statelessness in the Southern African region. It extracts and summarises relevant text about the colonial period to describe the role of colonialism in creating and perpetuating statelessness. It examines current national immigration policy frameworks to assess the direction of current and proposed immigration platforms, namely in the Republic of South Africa. Finally, it references papers and media articles from scholars who research xenophobia in Southern Africa to establish current xenophobia trends and trajectories and link them to colonial practices. III. STATELESSNESS IN SOUTHERN AFRICA The very nature of statelessness — that people are undocumented and unaccounted for — makes it impossible to know how many people in the world, or in any region or country, are affected.10 The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights estimates that hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Africans do not have access to a nationality.11 The status of many others is in doubt or in dispute. According to the UNHCR, it is not possible to determine the number of stateless Ibid. United Nations (UN) “‘2 million” stateless people globally, warns UNHCR chief in call to States for decisive action’ UN News (12 November 2018), available at https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/11/1025561 11 Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Internally Displaced Persons ‘The right to nationality in Africa’ African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (2014). 9 10 78