Second-class citizens? Gender in African citizenship law

Abstract

In recent publications, Manby (2009, 2010) has pointed out serious inequities in African citizenship laws. As women are one of the largest groups at risk of unequal treatment, we systematically examine sub-Saharan African citizenship laws for discriminatory provisions and language. We find that for laws currently in force, legal treatment of women is uneven, both across the continent and within countries. We consider the role gender plays in transmitting citizenship to children, as well as differences between the genders in citizenship transmitted through marriage. Some countries are gender neutral in most or all aspects of the law, others are gender neutral with respect to parents and children but favor men in transmitting citizenship to their wives, and others still discount the role of women in both respects. We employ quantitative methods to understand the background conditions that influence citizenship law, finding that temporal and demographic factors have some systematic influence. To understand when and how citizenship laws may change, we examine case study evidence of women's movements as a means for bringing about gender equality, finding that targeted legal action or major constitutional overhauls can help render citizenship laws more gender neutral.

Keywords::

• citizenship
• Africa
• gender
• women
• citizenship law
• women's movements

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Vania de Lourdes de Frederico for translation assistance and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. The authors are responsible for any errors.

Notes

^1. For a review of specific aspects of gender justice in sub-Saharan Africa, see Nyamu-Musembi (2007).

^2. Other attempts to classify citizenship laws beyond jus soli and jus sanguinis include the OECD's SOPEMI report of 1994, and Hansen and Weil (2001).

^3. Most African citizenship laws, with the notable exception of South Africa, do not make any provision for same-sex marriage or any other rights for LGBT communities.

^4. One exception is Morocco's 2007s law, which allows either parent to pass citizenship to a child (Article 7).

^5. We find a reasonably strong, positive correlation between the percentage of Muslims and male-oriented citizenship laws: 0.455. Correlations for the other three religious traditions vary from − 0.15 to − 0.22. Using all these measures would clearly result in some autocorrelation, so we employ the Muslim variable in the statistical regression.

^6. Robust regression, used to calculate the impact of some outliers, mimics these results but elevates land area to significance and improves the performance of the Muslim variable. With so few observations, multiple regression was determined to be the most reasonable statistical method to employ.