This book, by an acknowledged expert on human rights in Africa, discusses the hundreds of thousands living as non-persons in the only African state they have ever known. Not recognized as citizens, they have no access to education, state health services, travel documents, or employment without a work permit. Most of all, they cannot vote, stand for office, or work for state institutions. Ultimately such policies can lead to disaster or war. The conflicts in Côte d'Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo are at heart conflicts over the rights of divided populations to share fully the rights and duties of citizenship. Bringing together new research from across Africa, this book makes the case for urgent reform of the law.
This book, by an acknowledged expert on human rights in Africa, discusses the hundreds of thousands living as non-persons in the only African state they have ever known. Not recognized as citizens, they have no access to education, state health services, travel documents, or employment without a work permit. Most of all, they cannot vote, stand for office, or work for state institutions. Ultimately such policies can lead to disaster or war. The conflicts in Côte d'Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo are at heart conflicts over the rights of divided populations to share fully the rights and duties of citizenship. Bringing together new research from across Africa, this book makes the case for urgent reform of the law.
Struggles for Citizenship in Africa: A Guide to Knowledge as Power
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Struggles for Citizenship in Africa: A Guide to Knowledge as Power
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Overview
This book, by an acknowledged expert on human rights in Africa, discusses the hundreds of thousands living as non-persons in the only African state they have ever known. Not recognized as citizens, they have no access to education, state health services, travel documents, or employment without a work permit. Most of all, they cannot vote, stand for office, or work for state institutions. Ultimately such policies can lead to disaster or war. The conflicts in Côte d'Ivoire and the Democratic Republic of Congo are at heart conflicts over the rights of divided populations to share fully the rights and duties of citizenship. Bringing together new research from across Africa, this book makes the case for urgent reform of the law.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848133525 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zed Books |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2009 |
| Series: | African Arguments Series |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Bronwen Manby works with the Africa Governance Monitoring and Advocacy Project (AfriMAP).
Read an Excerpt
Struggles for Citizenship in Africa
By Bronwen Manby
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2009 Open Society InstituteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-352-5
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
'We needed a war because we needed our identity cards. Without an identity card you are nothing in this country.' A fighter for the rebel 'new forces' in Côte d'Ivoire condensed the argument of this book into two short sentences: that the denial of a right to citizenship has been at the heart of many of the conflicts of post-colonial Africa, and that it is time to change the rules. Côte d'Ivoire may be an extreme case, but political crises since independence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Mauritania, Uganda and elsewhere show the same pattern: political leaders seek to buttress their support among one part of their country's population by excluding another from the right to belong to the country at all.
Hundreds of thousands of people living in Africa find themselves non-persons in the only state they have ever known. They cannot get their children registered at birth or entered in school or university; they cannot access state health services; they cannot obtain travel documents, or employment without a work permit; and if they leave the country they may not be able to return. Most of all, they cannot vote, stand for office or work for state institutions.
Ultimately such policies can lead to economic and political disaster, or even war. Even where they do not, they have been used to subvert the democratic process and reinforce or prolong the hold on power of one group at the expense of another. At the expense, too, of national stability and economic progress. The result has been the mass suffering of people whose only fault may be to have the wrong last name.
Alternatively, questions of citizenship have been used to prevent specific individuals from challenging for political position or to silence those who criticize the government. At one time it seemed as though half the most important opposition politicians in Africa were allegedly not citizens of the country where they lived and worked – allegations often based on absurd arguments about ancestral origins on the wrong side of colonial borders that did not exist at the time of the individual's or his parents' birth. Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia and Alassane Ouattara of Côte d'Ivoire – a former president and a former prime minister – are only the most high-profile politicians or critics who have found themselves excluded from office or denied citizenship in this way.
Common to all these situations is the manipulation of citizenship laws: the detailed rules and regulations by which individuals can obtain recognition of their right to belong to a state, to claim equal protection under its laws, to vote in its elections and stand for office. Much as discrimination in these cases is always multifaceted, with raw violence at its extremes, the apparently dry detail of the rules for obtaining papers can hide an ocean of discrimination and denial of rights. The use and abuse of the law frames and enables the politics of ethnic exclusion. Reform of the law can be the first step back from conflict and the start of a politics of inclusion.
The pattern of these crises of citizenship is not haphazard. They are closely linked to the colonial heritage of each country; and in particular the migration and land expropriation that was implemented or facilitated by the colonial authorities. It is not a coincidence that the countries where citizenship has been most contentious are often the countries that saw the greatest colonial-era migration; migration not only of Europeans and Asians to the continent, but in even greater numbers of Africans within the continent.
Today, however, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who migrated are now regarded as foreigners without a true claim to belong to the new polity. Yet they are in the land of their birth and lifelong residence and have no claim on the protection of any other state. Millions of people are thus presumed to have the right to exercise citizenship rights, including the right to vote or stand for office or be appointed an official, only in some other country that they have never seen. Politically disenfranchised, there is no demonstration of loyalty that can satisfy the requirements of the law.
This injustice is multiplied by a gender inequality in the law which still in many countries disallows women who marry non-citizens from passing their own citizenship to their children or their husband, though men can do so without question. The victims of this sort of discrimination are mostly invisible in the media, because they are dispersed throughout wider populations, yet those affected must number in the millions across the continent.
Citizenship law in Africa: a history of discrimination and exclusion
Africa's 'artificial' borders are often blamed for Africa's wars. The borders of all the African states, even those that were not themselves colonized, were set by European colonial powers; most of them during the notorious Berlin conference of 1884-85 that marked the end of the 'Scramble for Africa'. In 1964 the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the club of Africa's newly independent states, decided to stick with these borders and not renegotiate them. There has been much discussion about the wisdom of this decision, and whether the leaders of the newly independent countries should rather have aimed to redesign African borders along more 'natural' lines: that is, along lines that followed boundaries of language and ethnicity and pre-colonial political structures, rather than being set with ruler and map by people thousands of miles away who had never seen the land they were dividing up.
Borders throughout the world have been established by war and conquest, and Africa is unusual rather in the abruptness of the transition than in the arbitrariness of the outcome. Yet the rapidity both of the creation of African colonies and of the winning of independence from the late 1950s at the end of less than a century of European rule meant that the leaders who took control of Africa's new states faced a particular challenge to create an 'imagined community' among groups of people thrown together without their own permission. The colonial period was both long enough to do very serious damage to pre-existing institutions of government, and too short to create strong new institutions that had more than the most superficial legitimacy in the eyes of the populace. Africa's post-colonial history shows how difficult it has been to create a functioning polity from scratch among peoples without a history of common political organization; but also how surprisingly persistent is the attachment to the units created by the colonizers.
In addition to bequeathing an inherent institutional weakness to the new states, the European empires also left a legacy of legal systems that had created a many-tiered citizenship structure whose central feature was racial discrimination. The colonies were founded on a basis of racial and ethnic distinction 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 colonizers; and on the other there were African 'natives' (indigènes) – who were subjects. With the exception of a small minority admitted to full citizenship, the native or indigène was a subordinate being without full rights, and regarded as essentially a child under European guardianship. Those from other continents (especially Asia) or of mixed race occupied a middle position often with their own specific rules. Throughout Africa, racial discrimination determined not only political rights, but also freedom of movement, and most importantly the right to hold land. In the 'settler colonies' deemed suitable for large-scale white immigration the distinctions were particularly marked, but throughout Africa whites were eligible for freehold title to land granted by the colonial state; Africans' rights to hold land were often both geographically restricted and conceptually limited to what the colonial power interpreted their subjects' 'traditional' laws to be.
At the same time, paradoxically, the law often favoured those Africans who were believed to be 'native' to a place over those other Africans who had migrated there more recently – including those who had moved with the encouragement or coercion of the colonial government. There were clear differences in the structures of government introduced by the different colonial powers, with the civil-law countries favouring a more assimilationist approach, and the British preferring where they could to co-opt pre-existing institutions to the system that became known as indirect rule. But there were also commonalities. Institutions were created that for the most part followed the logic of what Europeans called 'tribe', grouping together people whom the colonizers (and their anthropologists) decided had a common language and culture. 'Chiefs' of these groups, approved or created by the colonizers, were authorized to take lower-level decisions affecting their own ethnic subjects. The higher-level courts and administrators backed up this authority (so long as there was no challenge to the colonizers' power), based where necessary on their own interpretation of the relevant 'customary' law. Individuals who found themselves outside the geographical zone of the 'tribe' to which it was determined they belonged could be doubly disadvantaged. These migrants benefited neither from the legal rights given those subject to 'European' law, nor from the 'customary' protections given those who could make a claim on a particular 'tribal' leader.
At independence, the laws of the new states were designed to reassert the equal rights of all races and ethnicities. New citizenship laws were adopted, largely based on models from the power that had colonized them, but using the versions that had applied at home to their own full citizens rather than in their colonies. As in other regions of the world, these new laws generally based the right to citizenship on a combination of descent from parents who themselves were citizens and the fact of birth in the country. Though gender bias was a common feature of these laws – as it was at the time in the European states – formal equality between races was the norm. The term 'native' itself was reappropriated in the former British colonies to be a term of pride and not denigration (though the same did not happen to indigène in French).
To a great extent this process was both necessary and positive. The reclaiming of political and economic space sometimes went further, however: beyond steps to create equality before the law and to redress the economic and political inequalities that the colonial era had created, to measures that excluded those who had arrived in the wake of empire from the right to protection by the new state at all. Some of the countries most affected by migration created rules for membership that explicitly or implicitly denied citizenship to people whose parents had been immigrants – but who themselves had been born in the country and knew no other home. As 'native' became a positive label, 'settler' came to be a term of abuse.
Transitional rules were of course needed everywhere to cater for the handover of legal authority from the colonial power to the new states. Although international law is clear on the basic principle that individuals who were ordinarily resident in the former state become nationals of the new state, the rules were in some cases written or rewritten to exclude those who were asserted to have insufficient 'historical' connection to the territory concerned. Many of the problems related to citizenship rights described in this book have their root causes in the manipulation and exploitation of the rules that governed the transition to independence. A number of states from the outset aimed to exclude from citizenship those who could not claim an ancestral link to the land; and several others amended their laws in the years after independence to strengthen a racial or ethnic element in the law. The detail of the dates at which a person's ancestor arrived in the country became of critical importance to their rights today.
Thus, citizenship laws were written in many new African states that introduced rules specifically designed to exclude recent migrants from full citizenship rights; and in particular to exclude the descendants of European and Asian immigrants from citizenship by birth, even if they might have the right to naturalize. In some countries (Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo) the constitution itself still limits those who may be citizens by birth to the ethnic groups present in the country on a particular date, with many arguments about what that date should be; in others (Sierra Leone and Liberia) only those 'of negro descent' can be full citizens; in yet others (among them Nigeria) there is an implied preference for the native over the immigrant in citizenship laws that require descent from ancestors who were born in the country.
A similar distrust was applied to those potential citizens of the new states who might have a claim on another passport; the great majority of African countries prohibited dual citizenship either at or soon after independence (though the rules have often changed in recent years). They wished to ensure that those who might have a claim on another citizenship – especially those of European, Asian or Middle Eastern descent – had to choose between their two possible loyalties. Those who did not take the citizenship of the newly independent country were then regarded with suspicion, as a possible 'fifth column' for the former colonial powers and other interests.
Not coincidentally, these rules were most problematic in those countries where colonial-era migration and dispossession of land had been most marked, where the numbers of those who had arrived during empire remaining after independence were largest, and where the political power of those affected was weakest. As happened later following the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the European empires in Africa retreated they left behind a legacy of resentment of incomers and their privileges that still reverberates today. But the migration of the first half of the twentieth century was not only of Europeans and Asians: hundreds of thousands of Africans also moved, sometimes under duress, as a result of the political and economic changes brought by colonization. Despite the strong rhetoric of African solidarity that all governments express, these migrants also find their right to citizenship and belonging under threat today.
Some of the most egregious cases of citizenship discrimination in Africa are described in detail in this book. They illustrate the consequences for peace and security of national citizenship law, policy and rhetoric that found their structure on an ethnic or racial basis; the use and abuse of citizenship law to silence political opponents; and the everyday injustice to ordinary people that results. Though it is tempting for politicians all over the world to mobilize an 'in-group' of supporters by blaming an 'out-group' of alleged foreigners for all their troubles, the consequences of a focus on blood-and-soil connection to the country can be disastrous not only for that group, but for the country as a whole.
Denationalized groups
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the disputed 'indigenous' or 'non-indigenous' status of the Banyarwanda populations (speaking dialects of the Kinyarwanda language centred on modern-day Rwanda) of the eastern provinces has been at the heart of the conflicts that have afflicted the region. Disputes over the law have been at the heart of the wider debate. The changing balance of political power at national level has been reflected first in the decision to create an ethnic definition for citizenship in the constitution, and then in the repeatedly amended laws that have shifted the 'date of origin' for an ethnic group to qualify for citizenship back and forth with the political tide. At different times, this date was set at 1885 (the date of creation of the Belgian king's personal colony, the 'Congo Free State'), 1908 (the date the colony was transferred to the Belgian state), 1950 and 1960 (the date of independence). Those excluded by these laws form the core of the rebel groups that have challenged central authority since the late 1990s.
This ethnic focus has its roots in population displacements of the years under colonial rule. Although parts of the territory that is now DRC (formerly Zaire) were, prior to colonization, already occupied by Kinyarwanda speakers, the Belgian colonial authorities greatly increased these numbers by transplanting tens of thousands of people from the already densely populated Rwanda and Burundi to eastern Congo to form a source of labour for commercial agricultural plantations. Then, at the moment of independence, eastern Congo also took in huge numbers of refugees fleeing violence in Rwanda and Burundi (sadly, a pattern to be repeated).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Struggles for Citizenship in Africa by Bronwen Manby. Copyright © 2009 Open Society Institute. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements, viii,1 Introduction, 1,
2 Empire to independence: the evolution of citizenship law in Africa, 26,
3 Natives and settlers, 37,
4 Mass denationalization and expulsion, 96,
5 Internal citizenship in a federal state, 109,
6 The importance of paperwork, 115,
7 Excluding candidates and silencing critics, 127,
8 Naturalization and long-term integration, 141,
9 Last words: before Africa can unite?, 157,
Notes, 162,
Further reading, 185,
Index, 191,