CITIZENSHIP AND STATELESSNESS IN THE MEMBER STATES OF THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITY 2020 government of South Africa created a highly formalized system of bilateral contracts with neighbouring countries for the purpose of supplying labour to mines and farms established on forcibly expropriated land.6 There were also significant inflows of white immigrants to the region, primarily from Europe. Both French and British administrations imported Asian and African labour to work on sugar plantations in Mauritius. Belgium also engaged in forcible recruitment of labour from Rwanda and Burundi to work on plantations in the east of its colony in the Congo, established on large tracts of expropriated land. Many others migrated to Congo independently of this programme; estimates of the total ranged up to several hundred thousand people, making them a very significant proportion of the population of eastern Congo, and a majority in some locations.7 The European empires established a many-tiered citizenship structure, founded on racial and ethnic distinctions that justified the gaps in standard of living and legal rights between rulers and ruled. On the one hand there were European settlers — who were full citizens with the same rights as their relatives who lived in the “home” country of the colonisers; and on the other there were African “natives” (indigènes or indígenas in French and Portuguese) — who held a lesser status and rights. These distinctions were taken to their logical extreme in South Africa. The policy implemented by the National Party government in power from 1948 until 1994, under the segregationist doctrine of apartheid, was that black South Africans should lose their South African citizenship and instead be allocated the citizenship of one of the ten “homelands”, intended to become (nominally) independent states that would, however, function principally as labour reserves for (white) South Africa.8 The efforts of the apartheid government in South Africa to destabilise neighbouring states also had impacts that continue to influence today’s challenges around nationality and statelessness.9 Decades of South African-sponsored conflict in Angola and Mozambique contributed to an almost complete destruction of schools, health care, agricultural production, safe water facilities, and transport systems. By 1990, it was estimated that as many as 350,000 Mozambican refugees were living in the homelands of Gazankulu and KaNgwane in South Africa.10 Three decades of war in Angola created more than half a million refugees, primarily fleeing to Namibia, Zambia, and the two Congos, but also to other states in the region; as well as displacing more than four million people within the country.11 Although these disruptions of the era of colonial and minority rule have ceased, migration within the SADC region and from the rest of Africa to SADC has increased greatly since South Africa attained democratic rule 11 6 Jonathan Crush, Alan Jeeves, and David Yudelman, South Africa's Labor Empire: A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mining Industry (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991). These bilateral agreements were inherited by the post-apartheid government. 7 Jean-Claude Willame, Banyarwanda et Banyamulenge: Violences Ethniques et Gestion de l’identitaire Au Kivu (Brussels; Paris: Institut africain-CEDAF ; L’Harmattan, 1997). 8 John Dugard, “South Africa’s Independent Homelands: An Exercise in Denationalization”, Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 10, no. 1 (1980): 11–36. 9 Joseph Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbours: Apartheid Power in Southern Africa (London : Bloomington, Ind: Catholic Institute for International Relations in collaboration with J. Currey ; Indiana University Press, 1986). 10 Chris Dolan, “Policy Choices for the New South Africa”, in Southern African Migration: Domestic and Regional Policy Implications, ed. Richard de Villiers and Maxine Reitzes (Johannesburg: Centre for Policy Studies, 1995), 53–58. 11 Kallu Kalumiya, “Angola: A Model Repatriation Programme?”, Refugee Survey Quarterly 23, no. 3 (2004): 205–34, https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/23.3.205; Jeff Crisp, José Riera, and Raquel Freitas, “Evaluation of UNHCR’s Returnee Reintegration Programme in Angola” (Geneva: UNHCR, 2008). UNHCR / December, 2020