When do ‘settlers’ or ‘natives’ become ‘citizens’?

In 2005 Tanzania issued new passports to its (eligible) citizens. Now it wants to issue national identity cards. At the same time it is expected to start allowing dual citizenship.

What is Tanzania really up to? Why a sudden shift in its conception of citizenship? When did dual citizenship become an issue? Who is behind the move to formalise Tanzanian identity/identities?

There are many answers to these questions. Some are speculative. Others are concrete. Whether patriotic/matriotic or not, those answers are either driven by collective and/or self-interests.

All this, claim the opportunists, is about becoming citizens of the world. We are living in a global village therefore we need to be able to move here, there and everywhere. After all Tanzania will benefit a lot if it allows us to share freely the privileges of our citizenship in developed countries.

But hey, exclaim the alarmists, this is about doing away with our nationalism! It is about opening the doors for settlers to appropriate the land we fought so hard to reclaim from colonialists! Just look at the way foreign biofuel companies are acquiring thousand of hectares to farm jatropha!

So, how do we separate the factual from the fictional? How do we make sense of conspiracy theories that claim it is The Prevention of Terrorism Act of 2002 that is redefining and regulating our identities? Or how do we come to terms with racial practices of rendering us second-class citizens?

More concretely: When – and how – does one acquire (full) citizenship? Whither – and what is – the relationship between (dual) citizenship and first/second class citizens? Who – and which community – benefits from (multiple) citizenship? Why – and to whom – is (transnational) citizenship becoming a popular discourse?

History has a cruel way of reminding us of who we are and how we became who we are. The history of how we fought to become citizens in the first place sheds a lot of light on the prospects and pitfalls of being dual citizens in a dual world of citizens and subjects. Let’s revisit this history.

The idea of citizenship in its modern, or rather contemporary, sense developed in Euro-America in the context of modernity and its quest for universality. However, this by no means implies that there was no such idea or closely related ideas outside the Euro-American polity/polities. But it implies that the definition(s) of what it means to be a citizen of a modern nation-state in societies other than Euro-American ones became coloured by the way that notion developed in Euro-America and particularly in the way it was selectively applied in the Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America especially in the context(s) of colonialism, imperialism and developmentalism.

It is this colouring that we need to unpack as we trace the historical and political trajectories and implications of the idea and praxis/practice of citizenship in Africa/Tanzania. Mahmood Mamdani’s question ’When does a Settler become a Native?’ [PDF 61kb] offers an insightful starting point. Any attempt to address that question would also lead us to note that people become natives or indigenous to a place when there are other people who can be defined as not being native to that place. By virtue of coming (late-r) to settle in that place they become settlers. As Mamdani aptly put in his inaugural lecture at the University of Cape Town (UCT) on 13 May 1998, the two categories belong together therefore to do away with one we have to do away with the other, since it is the relation between them that makes one a settler and the other a native.

We ought to always bear in mind that when early Euro-American explorers, civilisers, traders and missionaries reached the shores of the African continent in varying times and spaces, they encountered inhabitants. These inhabitants varied from those who thought of themselves as having always been there to those who knew they – or their ancestors – had migrated into those areas at a certain point in time. Of particular interest here is the fact that by the time the West, or Euro-America as it now widely known in academic circles, encountered Africa again – for that was not the first time – in the age of mercantile capitalism it found societies that had varying forms of social organisations and a sense of belonging in those communities.

Whether they referred to that belongingness as ‘citizenship’ or not is not the main concern here, as important as it is. The main concern is that these communities in Africa had that sense, and thus they developed forms of governance to regulate belongingness. They also developed discourses that differentiated who belongs, who does not belong and who could or could not belong – a cursory look at a cross-section of names/ terms, such as ‘Chasaka’, ‘Umnyamahanga’ and ‘Mnyika’ from African languages attest to that for they literally meant those coming from far lands in and/or beyond the ‘bush.’

As such, as expected in any grouping or community, the idea or discourse of a ‘stranger’ and someone who want to ‘settle’ or even ‘invade’ for that matter was present in Africa prior to its encounter with Euro-America. The history of the so-called Bantu migration in Africa, though still a contentious area of study with varying accounts of it, is a classical case. So is the history of the migrations of the so-called nomadic tribes of which the Maasai is seen as its epitome. The Hamitic Myth and the Rwanda Genocide of 1994 have rendered the Tutsi migration another classical case. There is also that migration of Nguni speaking people in the wake of the Mfecane war in South Africa in the 19th Century. If there were such cases of settling within Africa prior to colonialism what then makes the settling that was ushered by Euro-American colonial modernity a very peculiar case?

A clue to an answer can be found in Mamdani’s 1998 Inaugural Lecture on When does a Settler become a Native? Reflections of the Colonial Roots of Citizenship in Equatorial and South Africa [PDF 61kb] . Another clue can be found in Frantz Fanon’s 1952 reflections in [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/.