Report on Citizenship Law: Zimbabwe foreign territory managed by local government structures established under British protection. Until 1948, the single status of “British subject” was applied to all those born within the crown’s dominions (including the United Kingdom); the term “British protected person” covered the people indigenous to a protectorate. A person born in Southern Rhodesia or any other colony had the same status as one born in Britain in relation to their rights in Britain or to British diplomatic or consular protection. However, “the simple nomenclature ‘British subject’ affords, within the Empire, no clue as to his rights”.3 The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914 expressly allowed the colonies to treat “different classes of British subjects” differently—allowing for racial discrimination and land expropriation across the British empire, but in Africa above all.4 In Southern Rhodesia, the same distinctions between the legal status of citizenship and the rights of different categories of citizens within the territory—between “Europeans” and “natives”—applied as within other settler colonies, as well as distinctions between “natives” and “native foreigner” migrant workers. The Natives Registration Act required men of African descent to carry identity documents (“passes”) indicating their status. In 1948, Southern Rhodesia became an “independent Commonwealth country”, a new status established by the British Nationality Act of 1948, the first comprehensive statutory regulation of British nationality. The new framework envisaged a set of interlocking citizenships for British territories that had gained self-rule (at that date, mainly the “dominions” created in 1931, including neighbouring South Africa, as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, and Ceylon). According to this scheme, British subjects in the UK and remaining colonies were renamed “citizens of the UK and colonies”, while the newly independent states enacted their own laws on citizenship; in intention, and initially at least partially in reality, each territory would give greater rights to citizens of other Commonwealth states, on a reciprocal basis, than to other foreigners. The Southern Rhodesian Citizenship and British Nationality Act of 1949 was adopted in line with the planned scheme for all the independent Commonwealth countries, based on a standard model. It conferred citizenship on a jus soli basis to those born in Southern Rhodesia, before or after the act came into force, with the usual exceptions relating to those whose fathers had diplomatic status or were enemy aliens.5 Those born outside the country of a father who was a citizen “otherwise than by descent” became citizens by descent; that is, citizenship could only transmit for one generation born outside the country. For those born after the act came into force, consular registration of a birth outside Southern Rhodesia was also a requirement.6 The white minority government in Southern Rhodesia successfully argued for Britain to create a formal link to the protectorates of Nyasaland (now Malawi) and Northern Rhodesia, overcoming the protests of the African leaders in those territories, to ease the import of labour for white-owned farms and mines. The “Central African Federation” was established in 1953, by which time there were already a quarter of a million migrant workers 3 E. F. W. Gey van Pittius, Nationality within the British Commonwealth of Nations (London: PS King & Son, 1930), 163; see also Rieko Karatani, Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth, and Modern Britain (London ; Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2003); Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 4 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1914, section 26: “Nothing in this Act shall take away or abridge any power vested in, or exercisable by, the Legislature or Government of any British Possession, or affect the operation of any law at present in force which has been passed in exercise of such a power, or prevent any such Legislature or Government from treating differently different classes of British subjects.” 5 Southern Rhodesia Citizenship and British Nationality Act 1949 (No.13 of 1949), section 6. 6 Ibid., section 7. RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2019/1 - © 2019 Author(s) 3