The complications of this argument illustrate the difficulty
of basing citizenship rights on the playground principle of ‘I
was here first’. The reality is that in today’s globalized world
millions of people can trace ancestry to two or more different
locations. Sometimes those locations are thousands of kilometres
apart across the ocean; sometimes just the other side of a political border created for the first time a century or a decade ago.
Many people of African descent are fighting for their rights to be
fully acknowledged as citizens in the countries that previously
colonized Africa.
Beyond citizenship law
21
Introduction
The stories told in this book are partial histories, of course: the
issues at stake in the civil wars in Congo and Côte d’Ivoire, in the
old-fashioned interstate clash between Eritrea and Ethiopia, or
in the discrimination against Europeans, Lebanese or Asians in
Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone and Uganda are not restricted to the legal
definition of who is a citizen of the states concerned. Citizenship
law has been used as a tool to get at issues of economic and
political power: control of land, commercial opportunities and
public office. Extreme violence and discrimination are possible
without any abuse of citizenship law to support their deployment,
as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda shows. Marginalized groups can
be excluded from effective exercise of citizenship rights even if
their right to legal citizenship in itself is not contested, notably
in the case of individuals subjected to slavery or its contemporary
variations, or ethnic groups following a different lifestyle from
the national norm, including nomads such as pastoralists or
hunter-gatherers. The application of citizenship law may reflect
as much as reinforce these and other deep-seated cultural beliefs
or prejudices that exclude individuals from full participation
in a community; perhaps most obviously in the case of gender
discrimination.
There is a vast literature on the nature of nationalism and
nation-building, identity, race, ethnicity, gender, autochthony
and the politics of belonging, both in Africa and worldwide,