Growing up in Nigeria, I used to think everyone enjoyed the same rights of citizenship, but I soon came to question those childish beliefs. With rigorous erudition, Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa attempts to answer several questions: namely, how did various modes of citizenship evolve historically in Africa, and what are their contemporary implications?

In her introduction, Emma Hunter argues that there are two fundamental problems with scholarship on citizenship in Africa. First, it is often predicated on the assumption that the continent does not have a history of citizenship that precedes colonization. Second, citizenship is almost always seen in terms of privileges and the legal rights that accompany them, thus making us lose sight of other domains in which modes of political belonging are articulated. Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa addresses this vacuum by presenting the works of ten African scholars—historians, political scientists, and sociologists—to provide a more balanced study of citizenship on the continent. Collectively, the scholars draw on precolonial and colonial archival materials to historicize the notion of citizenship and contemporary sociopolitical realities and to reveal how they continue to evolve in the present.

The volume is divided into three parts, arranged chronologically. The three chapters of part 1 examine how modes of citizenship and structures of power in precolonial and colonial Africa both included and excluded Africans. Nicole Ulrich argues, for example, that in the Cape of Good Hope citizenship was highly hierarchical, hinging on factors such as social class, the terms of one’s labor, and status—free or slave. Cherry Leonardo and Chris Vaughan examine the dichotomy in Sudan between “‘local’ and ‘national’ citizenship” (75) by looking at how literate individuals became the voice of their community and tried to wrestle power from oppressive local authorities by writing to a “higher authority”: the national legislative assembly. Similarly, Aidan Russell argues that in Burundi changing colonial political structures created highly unstable terms of citizenship, by which Burundians were sometimes subjects and at other times citizens.

Part 2 explores citizenship in postcolonial Africa. Its overarching theme is that the definition of citizenship in the period immediately following independence was highly unstable and malleable as new states pushed against neocolonialism by experimenting “with alternative and more expansive models” of governance (6). For many countries independence also marked the beginning of conceptualizing citizenship “in terms of a legal status granted or withheld by the state” (5). Heri-Michel Yéré examines Houphouet-Boigny’s short-lived 1963 idea in the Ivory Coast of “double nationalité”: a citizenship model that granted “the same rights and duties as citizens” to immigrants from Francophone West Africa (128). Samantha Balaton-Chrimes’s chapter on challenges of inclusion faced by Nubians in colonial and postcolonial Kenya argues that citizenship is “a [non-absolute] multidimensional legal status that is constructed and contested by agential political subjects” (167). Ramola Ramtohul contends that the unique history of Mauritius as a country with no “indigenous population . . . [and] populated entirely by migrants” created a hierarchical, shifting, “differentiated and unequal form of citizenship” (187) based largely on race and civic identity.

Part 3 examines forms of citizenship and political belonging in contemporary Africa. V. Adefemi Isumonah argues that the notion of citizenship in Nigeria, for instance, favors ethnic group rights over individual rights, offering opportunities for equal political representation for every ethnic group—large or small—in a heterogeneous society. Focusing on Ethiopia, Solomon M. Gofie argues, by contrast, that the idea of citizenship based on “peoples” or ethnic identities is “a legacy of colonialism” that has hindered Ethiopia’s attainment of true democracy. The final chapter, by Eghosa E. Osaghe, suggests that ethnic-based principles of citizenship are limiting, and that many supposed “citizens” in contemporary Nigeria do not receive the “benefits of citizenship because of the subordinated, excluded or marginalized groups they belong to” (256). As a Nigerian, I couldn’t agree more with Osaghe. Communities that truly benefit from government programs are those with the largest populations, while the voices of minority ethnic groups often go unheard.

This volume contributes significantly to scholarship on citizenship and belonging in Africa, although some crucial issues have been left out. For example, with the passing of laws that criminalize same-sex relationships across Africa, from Uganda to Nigeria to Egypt to Lesotho, gender and sexuality have strong implications in regard to the principles of citizenship and belonging. How does a person’s gender or sexual orientation in contemporary Africa affect his or her engagement with the state, and how do contemporary African societies conceptualize gender and sexuality in relation to citizenship? Likewise, the volume does not examine how religion and religious affiliation have shaped citizenship and belonging in Africa. Nonetheless, this is an impressive and extremely valuable book.