Social Science Research Council

Welcome to www.africanarguments.org! Hosted by the Royal African Society and the Social Science Research Council, we promise to make African Arguments Online the site of the most vigorous debates on Africa available on the web.

This debate is organized by the Open Society Institute (OSI). In October 2009, one of OSI’s projects on statelessness and citizenship discrimination in Africa resulted in Struggles for Citizenship in Africa, a book published by African Arguments, and Citizenship Law in Africa, a monograph published by OSI. For more information about the books and related projects visit http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/focus/equality_citizenship.

So far the debate has focused on citizenship as a status within the borders of certain nation states in Africa and the dire consequences of the inability to obtain such status. Yet, legal rights and identity documents that indicate citizenship is only one dimension of citizenship. If we would apply a gender lens to the debate around citizenship in Africa it exposes inequalities locked into the nature of citizenship (as status) that is linked to the inability to claim rights and participate as agents of citizenship.

The Harmonised Draft Constitution’s provisions on citizenship go a long way to resolving the problems of belonging to and identification with Kenya that pertain today. Through those provisions, Kenyans will finally propel themselves into the 21st century world—which is a world far beyond the limited conception of an ethnically and racially homogenous and patriarchal single-nation state. If it were to be on those provisions alone that the referendum’s outcome was to be determined, the Harmonised Draft Constitution would and should pass.

Article by: Markus Virgil Hoehne, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Note: For more detailed analysis, download the full version of this essay on the Crisis in the Horn of Africa essay forum.
Somalia has made international headlines for almost two decades now, first as a state of civil war characterized by clan warfare and humanitarian catastrophe, [...]

Recent research in Burundi on the repatriation of refugees has highlighted the strong link between land and citizenship. The research tracked the experience of refugees returning to southern Burundi and (re)claiming their citizenship. Most had been living in exile in Tanzania – some since the early 1990s, and others since 1972. Some were born in exile and had never been to Burundi before. Others left when they were children. But all of them had a strong notion that returning to Burundi signified an end to exile and an opportunity to finally become citizens of their homeland. And the measure of that renewed bond between citizen and state was their ability to recover land.