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Citizenship in Central and West Africa: The Politics of Indigeneity

Morten Bøås*

Questions concerning the politics of place, belonging, identity and contested citizenship are currently among the most crucial in African politics. With regard to the latter, the issue is simply not so much how people can vote, but the regulations that determine who can cast a ballot and who can stand for office. This suggests that at the heart of the matter we find the combined social practice of both the colonial and the postcolonial state; namely that citizenship is defined on the basis of indigeneity. Explicitly or implicitly almost all current social struggles on the African continent evolve around state practices with regard to the politics of place and indigeneity. There are many examples of this trend, including the Zambian constitution of May 1996 which effectively prevented Kenneth Kaunda, president of the country from 1964 to 1991, from running for office again because under the new constitution he was considered a foreigner.¹ In East and Central Africa, the controversy of citizenship is the hallmark of the collective memory of both the Asian population and the Tutsi of this region. Likewise, in the many wars of West Africa, similar issues are at stake. It is obvious in the case of Côte d'Ivoire and the ‘Ivoirité’ discourse, but also the Liberian war is ultimately about questions concerning what it means to be a Liberian and what kinds of rights and obligations are to be embedded in such a status.

The controversies over the issue of citizenship are not a new phenomenon on the African continent as their initial origins are to be found in the merger between precolonial practices and the ideas about the politics of place embedded in the colonial project, but it is also clear that the focus on ‘democratisation’ during the last decade has made citizenship laws and practices even more controversial than in the past. The reason is simply that suddenly, at least in theory, it mattered greatly who could vote and who could not.² The issue of voting constitutes an important dimension of current social struggles around the politics of indigeneity, but that should not lead us to think about this as a challenge of electoral governance solely because equally important is the whole question of access to and ownership over land. The purpose of this brief meditation is, therefore, to offer a few reflections on these issues based on recent events in Central and West Africa.

With a few exceptions, most African countries must be seen as multiethnic societies. In the precolonial era, the issue of citizenship (if one can speak meaningfully of such) was one of fluidity. Most often strangers of other racial and ethnic origins moved with relative ease between indigenous African polities. And, due to land being so abundant and migration so easy the preferred form of political protest was most often that of exit. The imposition of citizenship, which essentially tied each person to a specific territorially-bounded polity, was, therefore, an event of revolutionary magnitude in Africa. Particularly after independence in the 1960s, citizenship laws became salient. The new African states now had to permanently define who legitimately lived within the borders of their societies and who did not. This creation of the concept of the ‘foreigner’ brought about by impending independence, led to riots in many places in the 1950s and the 1960s. One example is Côte d'Ivoire where the ‘new’ citizens demanded that migrants, who already had suffered resentment for quite some time, should be expelled.³

The politics of place and indigeneity in Africa is closely connected to what we may call identity politics and the construction of collective memories. The construction of citizenship is all about drawing boundaries between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Citizenship and the formation of such are closely connected to the issue of the ‘other’ because without the ‘other’ becoming a citizen both as concept and social practice is meaningless. By itself, the ‘self’ has no social status. An idea of an identity (as embodied in the concept of citizenship) has to be expressed in relation to the ‘other’. This means that the ‘other’ becomes an epistemological necessity. What is at issue then is the establishment of the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Just as objects and experience are categorised, people also categorise themselves, and the outcome of this process of self-categorisation is an accentuation of similarities between the ‘self’ and other in-groups, and of differences between the ‘self’ and out-groups. Here, we have to add that the identification of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ is not given a priori, but is socially constructed. The boundaries between ‘self’ and ‘other’ are constantly reiterated and rewritten in processes of self-categorisation, where the ‘self’ tends to emerge out of this reflexitivity as what the ‘other’ is not.⁴ One way of looking at this is to see it as the outcome of processes of story-telling. We all tell stories, basically that is all we do, and by telling stories we define the world and our place within it. As acts of self-definition this story-telling takes place within a pre-established frame. It can constitute, mould or break this frame, but it will always be conditioned by it. Most of these stories are first and foremost important for the practices of everyday life. However, when combined with perceived experiences of grievances (political and/or economic) they can be combined to form powerful meta-narratives about ‘self’ and ‘other’. A meta-narrative as the term is used here is therefore the supposedly transcendent and universal ‘truth’ about a collective ‘self’ and its relationship to other in-groups (e.g. ‘others’).⁵ The power of the meta-narrative is, therefore, located in its empowerment of those who ‘master’ them to integrate a wider set of memories, experiences and aspirations in a perceived coherent whole. The politics of memories is, therefore, an integral dimension in the construction of meta-narratives.⁶ The following brief examples from Central Africa and West Africa will help to illustrate these conceptual points.

For outsiders, the Rwanda-Uganda quarrel may indeed look like an irrational and emotional family feud, between the Bahima Bayankole leaders of Uganda and the Tutsi Rwandan refugees who took refugee and lived in Ankole after the Hutu ‘social revolution’ of 1959. However, this relationship is firmly embedded in meta-narratives about belonging, identity and indigeneity. It is based on these that perceptions and actions are shaped.

Prior to the genocide in 1994, Tutsi refugees mainly left Rwanda in three different periods: in 1959-61, 1963-64 and 1973.⁷ Those who arrived in Uganda faced a situation of becoming refugees permanently as successive Ugandan governments considered even the children of refugees to be refugees – ‘once a refugee always a refugee’. The Banyarwanda as they are known in Uganda was the target both of popular prejudice and official discrimination. For example, when Obote in 1969 ordered the removal of all unskilled foreigners from public employment, this was first and foremost directed against the Banyarwanda. Not surprisingly many Banyarwanda welcomed Amin's coup. However, some also soon joined the anti-Amin forces. Most prominent of these was Fred Rwigyema who joined Museveni's struggle against Amin in the mid-1970s.⁸ When the civil war re-started, after the rigged elections of 1980 that brought Obote back to power, Obote deliberately referred to Museveni's NRM as the ‘Banyarwanda’. The outcome could be written in blood as the army stepped up its atrocities towards the Banyarwanda, more and more of the Bayarwanda joined Museveni's forces. Quite naturally, a guerrilla will harvest young recruits from victimised communities. Thus, when Museveni took over power in Kampala in January 1986, about one-third of his more than 16,000 troops were of Banyarwanda origin.

Did the Banyarwanda join the struggle to acquire the military skills necessary to build an organisation that could fight the Hutu-regime in Kigali? This may have been the case. It is, however, much more likely that they joined not only as a mere survival strategy, but also in order to stage a claim for Ugandan citizenship. ‘Going home’ was not the single most important dimension of the Banyarwanda discourse in the early 1980s. This dimension rose to the forefront only when the Banyarwanda came to realise that the social practice of ‘once a refugee, always a refugee’ was to continue in the new Uganda of Museveni as they once more were ‘roughed up’, in spite of the fact that many had taken part in the struggle both against Amin and Obote.⁹

The point that can be made from these experiences is the proposition that the perceptions and actions of the current Tutsi leadership in Kigali are informed by a meta-narrative of betrayal. They fought for Museveni in the Luwero Triangle. In their script, they paid with their blood in order to become naturalised as Ugandans when the war was over. This was also a promise Museveni made to the Tutsi refugees that fought for the NRA,¹⁰ but he was not going to keep it. The period after 1986 was, therefore, constituted by a series of betrayals for the collective memory of the Banyarwanda: the single-most important being the removal in November 1989 of Fred Rwigyema as Army Chief of Staff by Museveni. If Rwigyema could not become Ugandan, no Banyarwanda could become naturalised. In this alternative explanation, it is this ‘great betrayal’ of the Tutsi by Museveni who forges the Tutsi determination to return home (and such a return could only take place through the ‘barrel of a gun’).¹¹ The bitter truth for the Tutsis who should come to constitute the leadership of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) was that in the politics of indigeneity in Africa even your own blood could not buy you citizenship. This meta-narrative of betrayal was, therefore, also to become a defining moment in the establishment of another: the meta-narrative about the politics of place and security of the Tutsi. The only place the Tutsi self could secure itself was in the ‘ancient’ homeland, and the borders of this homeland must be protected at all costs because, if not, a new genocide would be lurking around the corner. The tension between the respective regimes of Kigali and Kampala is, therefore, not a by-product of the political economy of conflict of the Congolese war as the ‘Greed and Grievance’ literature suggests, but an outcome of lived experiences of resistance, sacrifice and betrayal. It is this meta-narrative that currently informs the actions undertaken by the Kigali leadership, and it is precisely to these actions underwritten by the same script that Kampala reacts.

During the single-party period, the many groups that make up the Ivorian polity were for all purposes successfully balanced and co-opted by the postcolonial state. This success owed much to the astute political strategies of Felix Houphouët-Boigny. From 1960 to 1993, the country was firmly under his rule as he used the spoils of the export crop economy to lock local elites to the state through the mediation of the Parti Démocratique de la Côte d'Ivoire (PDCI). This was effected in order to construct the widest possible elite consensus built on a share-out of spoils to various groups and marginalisation of those who refused to join in.

Under the years of single-party rule, Côte D'Ivoire had been pursuing an ‘open door’ policy to immigration. Thus, in 1988, foreigners probably accounted for nearly one-third of the population.¹² These were allowed to vote in Ivorian elections. Since these elections were not competitive in any real sense of the word, this had not been regarded as a particular serious matter: it was the immigrants' way of ‘kissing’ Boigny's ‘hand’ in gratitude for his hospitality. However, as the country in 1990 was preparing for an election, which for the first time potentially could reshape the political landscape, questions concerning citizenship and who had the right to vote and stand for election suddenly became important. Thus, when it was confirmed by the government that the foreigners ‘already registered’ were to be permitted to vote in the 1990 multiparty elections, the opposition added this to its already substantial list of accusations of rigging and unfair practices. The main opposition party – Front Populaire Ivoirien (FPI) – deliberately used this question of who were entitled to vote and stand for election to build a national basis of support by arousing an Ivorian xenophobic nationalism. In the southern parts of the country, such sentiments were already well-established in parts of the population. This was the start of the Ivoirité-discourse, which was to emerge even more strongly in the build-up to the 1995 elections.

For the first time in the country's postcolonial history, the political elite now began to develop a popular campaign around the theme of Ivorian national identity. Such a campaign was bound to arouse and intensify already existing popular hostility to foreign immigrants, which had been suppressed for over two decades, but thanks to the opposition had been extensively mobilised during the 1990 elections. Boigny's successor, Henri Konan Bédié, made it clear that foreigners were no longer going to be allowed to vote, and that only Ivoiriens de souche (‘pure-blooded’ Ivorians) would be allowed to run the country. The creation of such a specific popular discourse on citizenship helped facilitate the passing of an Electoral Law which stipulated that: (a) candidates for Presidency and for Deputy in the National Assembly should be Ivorians by birth, with both parents also Ivorians by birth; and (b) candidates should have resided continuously in the country for five years prior to the election, and should neither have renounced their Ivorian citizenship nor taken the nationality of another state.

When this electoral code was passed, it effectively sidelined the main opposition candidate at that time, Alassane Ouattara. The reason for this was very simple; although Ouattara himself has always stoutly maintained that he is an Ivorian and that his family belongs to the royal lineage of the ancient kingdom of Kong (north-eastern Côte d'Ivoire), doubts could be raised about the actual whereabouts of his father's birthplace. And even more damaging, at some point during his career as an international civil servant, after having completed higher education in the U.S., Ouattara had travelled on a Burkinabé passport. In order to achieve this ‘masterpiece’ of manipulation of the ethnic variable, Bédié marshalled his main assets – the patronage machine of the ruling PDCI, the paramilitary gendarmerie, and his support from France. It was in this manner that Bédié was able to engineer landslide victories in both presidential and legislative polls (22^nd October 1995 and 26^th November 1995, respectively).¹³ The same strategy was used to sideline Ouattara in the 1999 elections as well. ‘Ivoirité’ soon came to dominate the whole political discourse. Northerners were removed from posts in government and the army, and ‘foreigners’ were blamed for the economic crisis. They faced daily harassment and marginalisation as Bédié concentrated his power to the centre and south of the country.

It was in this climate of discrimination and xenophobia that General Robert Guei removed Bédié from power in a coup in December 1999. Initially Guei included Ouattara-supporters in his military junta, but the power base of this regime soon changed and they were kicked out again. Simultaneously, Guei embarked on revising the constitution with the same eagerness as his predecessor Bédié. As on previous occasions, the clear aim was to make it impossible for Ouattara to contest future elections. As a consequence, the October 2000 election became a contest between Guei and Gbagbo. The election campaign was extremely violent, and for a while Guei tried to stop the vote count in order to stay in power. However, in the end he was forced to resign and Gbagbo took over the presidency. Unfortunately, this did not lead to changes in the political practice behind the establishment of the meta-narrative of ‘Ivoirité’. Gbagbo like his predecessors has continued to manipulate the ‘Ivoirité’- discourse in order to maintain power. The only difference between Gbagbo and his predecessors was that the group now being promoted, particularly in the security forces, was Gbagbo's own group, the Bétés.¹⁴ It is these events that provided the background for the uprising on the 19^th September 2002, and the subsequent civil war and current stalemate.

Côte d'Ivoire is a multiethnic state to the degree that about 60 ethnic groups inhabit the physical space called Côte d'Ivoire. Officially, it is supposed to have a national polity, but as we have seen this polity is ill defined and contested, as key actors are unable to agree upon who can rightfully claim citizenship or not.

The underlying question in both cases, however, is the one concerning how to become a citizen: how to be able to state such a claim in a legitimate manner. The real tragedy of both the Ivorian conflict and the story about the Banyarwanda of Central Africa is that currently one of the few ways to state such a claim is through the ‘barrel of a gun’. Ever since the questions of who could stand for election and who could cast a vote began to matter in Côte d'Ivoire (e.g. from 1990), it has been possible for a successive strings of governments – Houphouët-Boigny, Bédié, Guei and Gbagbo – to manipulate this issue through the ivoirité-discourse. It was first when about 700 soldiers recruited by Guei took up arms because they were about to be demobilised against their wishes by Gbagbo that an Ivorian government was forced to even consider negotiating what it means to be ivoirité. A similar case can be made with regard to the situation of the Banyarwanda. The message this sends to people in both countries discussed here, but also elsewhere in Africa, is that if you have been defined as a ‘foreigner’ the only way to ‘come home abroad’ is to claim your case on the basis of armed resistance. The only way to ‘come home abroad’ is through the ‘barrel of a gun’, and such an attempt can easily be staged on a continent where both guns and those willing to use them are plentiful and the states often are much more part of the problem than of any sustainable solution. Thus, what this brief meditation suggests is an urgent need to rethink the principles on which citizenship is based in Africa. The Western model of citizenship based on indigeneity is clearly not the answer. Africa must find its own solutions and models, and there is an urgent need for an African conversation on this issue across cultures, ethnicities, and local and national borders. One possible starting point for such conversations is to frame them around the meta-narratives on which the creation of ‘self’ and ‘other’ is built. The deconstruction of these entities may prepare the ground for a new set of meta-narratives focusing on the integrative capacity of African societies rather than the current exclusionary practices.

1. The bizarre finding that Kaunda (whose parents were migrant Malawian missionaries who settled in what was then Northern Rhodesia in the 1920s, where Kaunda later was born) is not a Zambian citizen, when he in fact has an excellent claim to being the father of the modern nation of Zambia, points out the importance and the new contentiousness of laws governing citizenship in multiethnic societies in Africa.

2. Jeffrey Herbst (1999) ‘The role of citizenship laws in multiethnic societies: evidence from Africa’, in Richard Jospeh (ed.) State, Conflict and Democracy in Africa, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, p. 267.

3. In this regard, one should note that the closing of international borders (officially) became in itself an important sign of sovereignty in an immature international state system constituted by weak states and strong regimes. See Morten Bøås (2003) ‘Weak states, strong regimes: towards a "real" political economy of African regionalization’, in J. Andrew Grant and Fredrik Söderbaum (eds) The New Regionalism in Africa, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 31-46.

4. See Morten Bøås (2003) Conclusion: the task is always to revise’, in James J. Hentz and Morten Bøås (eds) New and Critical Security and Regionalism: Beyond the Nation State, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 203-212.

5. As such, the approach to meta-narratives suggested here clearly draws on Jean-Francois Lyotard's elaboration on this concept in his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

6. See Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor and Terence Ranger (2000) Violence & Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland, Oxford: James Currey, who argues that violence as a constant theme in Shangani history has given remembrance of the past, and the telling of history a particular significance not only in current Matabeleland but also in the larger Zimbabwean context.

7. This section draws on Mahmood Mamdani (2001) When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton: Princeton University Press, in particular chapter six and seven.

8. In the 1990s Rwigyema would led the RPF insurgency in Rwanda.

9. See Gérard Prunier (1998) ‘The Rwandan Patriotic Front’, in Christopher Clapham (ed.) African Guerrillas, pp. 119-33.

10. Ibid.

11. Mamdani (2001).

12. See Richard Crook (1991) ‘State, society and political institutions in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana’, in James Manor (ed.) Rethinking Third World Politics, London: Longman, pp. 214-239.

13. See Michael Bratton and Daniel N. Posner (1999) ‘A first look at second elections in Africa, with illustrations from Zambia’, in Richard Joseph (ed.) State, Conflict and Democracy in Africa, Boulder: Lynne Rienner, pp. 377-407.

14. See Fabienne Hara and Comfort Ero (2002) Ivory Coast on the Brink (http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/projects/showreport.cfm?reportid=853).

* Fafo – Institute for Applied International Studies; Oslo, Norway. Email: morten.boas@fafo.no

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