Patrícia Jerónimo acquire the citizenship of the new state and so deprived them of Portuguese citizenship ex lege (save for a few exceptions), with no regard to whether or not they wished to keep Portuguese citizenship and/or would become stateless as a result (Ramos 1976: 140-141). 2.2. Membership criteria in the First Republic (1975-1990)30 In preparation for independence, FRELIMO’s Central Committee approved, on 20 June 1975, both the Constitution of the Popular Republic of Mozambique and the Nationality Act, to enter into force at zero hours of the 25th of June 1975. True to its Marxist ideological blueprint, the Constitution defined Mozambique as a popular democracy where power belonged to the peasants and factory workers brought together and guided by FRELIMO, which was to act as the leading force of society and the state (Articles 2 and 3). The defence and consolidation of national unity were among the Popular Republic’s main goals (Article 4), which translated inter alia in a commitment to the ‘promotion and development of the national personality and culture’ and to the dissemination of information about the ‘Mozambican culture’ abroad (Article 15). The universalistic (as opposed to ‘tribalistic’) spirit of the Constitution was expressed in the provision that all citizens would be entitled to the same rights and bound by the same obligations, irrespective of colour, race, sex, ethnic origin, place of birth, religion, education, social standing and profession (Article 26 § 1), and that any act designed to hinder social harmony, to create divisions or privilege based on any of those criteria was to be punished by law (Article 26 § 2). Furthermore, the Constitution stressed the importance of gender equality, by making women’s emancipation one of the essential tasks of the state and by prescribing that women were equal to men in rights and obligations, an equality of status applicable throughout the political, economic, social and cultural fields (Article 17). If this were not enough, Article 29 prescribed that in Mozambique women and men enjoyed the same rights and obligations, and that this principle was to guide all of the state’s executive and legislative action.31 In spite of this attention to gender equality, the Nationality Act32 approved on the same day as the Constitution included provisions which discriminated on the basis of gender, often to the detriment of women. Children born abroad to a Mozambican mother would only be entitled to Mozambican citizenship if the mother had participated in the liberation struggle as part of FRELIMO, whereas children born abroad to a Mozambican father were ipso facto Mozambican citizens (Article 8). Only foreign women, not foreign men, were able to acquire 30 We follow here a common mapping of Mozambique’s constitutional evolution into two phases: the First Republic (1975-1990), marked by Marxist influence and a single-party system, and the Second Republic (1990 until the present), marked by the openness to the market economy, the endorsement of the rule of law and the introduction of a multi-party system. See e.g. Macuacua (2019a: 2). 31 The text of the 1975 Constitution is available at http://cedis.fd.unl.pt/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/CONSTMOC-75.pdf [24.03.2019]. The 1975 Constitution was amended on several occasions, first by decision of FRELIMO’s Central Committee (27 February 1976; 29 August 1977), later by Act of the National Assembly (Law no. 11/78, of 15 August 1978; Law no. 1/84, of 27 April 1984; Law no. 4/86, of 25 July 1986). Most of the amendments were chirurgical and focused on organisational aspects (e.g. hierarchy of provincial bodies, number of members of the National Assembly, creation of the office of Prime Minister) or on symbolic aspects, such as the description of the national flag. The most important amendment during this period was that of Law no. 11/78, which made explicit the goal of moving towards Socialism and reorganised the state powers accordingly, following the 1977 party congress in which FRELIMO rebranded itself as a vanguard workers’ party (Newitt 2002: 198). None of the amendments altered the provisions covered by our analysis. The texts of the constitutional amendments are published in Rodrigues et al. (2006: 37-61). 32 The text of the 1975 Nationality Act is available at https://macua.blogs.com/files/leinacionalidade3_75.pdf [24.03.2019]. 8 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2019/6 - © 2019 Author