Statelessness in Southern Africa Africa retreated, they left behind a legacy of resentment of incomers and their privileges that still reverberates. But the migration of the first half of the twentieth century was not only of Europeans, Asians or Middle Easterners: hundreds of thousands of Africans also moved, sometimes under duress, as a result of the political and economic changes brought by colonisation. The descendants of these migrants also find their right to citizenship and belonging questioned till today: among them are, for example, Zimbabweans whose ancestors came from Mozambique, Zambia or Malawi. Some countries in southern Africa have made deliberate efforts to integrate pre-independence migrant or displaced communities that were not integrated through the rules governing state succession. For example, in 1991 Namibia supplemented its citizenship act by adopting a specific piece of legislation offering Namibian citizenship to those who would have been Namibian citizens if they or their ancestors had not fled persecution before 1915.23 These people, largely Herero who had fled the German genocide of their people from 1904 to 1907, were given a five year period during which they could opt for Namibian citizenship. More recently, the Namibian government has negotiated with the Angolan, South African and Zambian governments to undertake a joint identification exercise among undocumented populations at risk of statelessness in its border regions; the process started in 2010, and by November 2011, more than 900 persons had been naturalised or officially recognised as Namibian through this process. Among them were around 200 people of Nama and Damara heritage removed in the 1970s by the South African government from the Riemvasmaak area of the Northern Cape to what was then South West Africa.24 The new government that took power in South Africa in 1994 granted a series of amnesties to several categories of migrants and refugees, as a transitional measure.25 Racial and ethnic discrimination Related to the history of colonisation, half a dozen countries in Africa limit citizenship from birth to members of ethnic groups whose ancestral origins are within the particular state or within the African continent. Liberia and Sierra Leone, both founded by freed slaves, take the position that only those “of Negro descent” may be citizens from birth. Meanwhile, citizenship is legally linked to ethnicity and “indigeneity” (or “autochthony”) in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Somalia, and to some extent in Nigeria. Discrimination on ethnic grounds in relation to citizenship is common in practice in many places, even if not explicitly stated in law. In southern Africa, Malawi’s 1966 nationality law provides that citizenship from birth is restricted to those who have at least one parent who is not only a citizen of Malawi but is also “a person of African race”.26 In Swaziland, the law does not specifically refer to ethnicity in relation to those born after the Constitution came into force, but a strong ethnic preference, reflected in a reference in the Constitution to “the class of persons generally regarded as Swazi by descent” and the provision of the 1992 Citizenship Act providing for citizenship “by KuKhonta” (that is, by customary law), has in practice ensured that 23 Namibian Citizenship Special Conferment Act, No.14 1991. Information provided at the UNHCR regional statelessness meeting 1-3 November 2011. 25 Even before comprehensive legislative changes to the immigration regime were passed, a series of immigration amnesties were offered to particular groups of foreigners from the region: contract mine workers (1995); a broader category of people from the SADC region who had lived in South Africa for at least five years and had economic or family ties in the country (1996); and finally Mozambicans displaced by the civil war in that country who had been refused refugee status by the apartheid government (1999). An estimated 1 to 1.5 million people became eligible for South African citizenship in this way, though only 51,000 applications were received from miners, and just over 200,000 for others from the SADC region. A discussion of these amnesties can be found in Bronwyn Harris, “A Foreign Experience: Violence, Crime and Xenophobia during South Africa’s Transition”, Violence and Transition Series, Vol. 5, South Africa, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, August 2001. See also essays in Jonathan Crush and Vincent Williams (eds.), The New South Africans? Immigration Amnesties and their Aftermath, Cape Town, Idasa, 1999; Human Rights Watch, Prohibited Persons: Abuse of Undocumented Migrants, Asylum Seekers and Refugees in South Africa, New York, March 1998. 26 Malawi Citizenship Act, 1966, sections 4, 5 and 12-15. 24 7