Far-reaching and comparative in scope, Citizenship in Africa: the law of belonging is an encyclopaedic culmination of Bronwen Manby’s scholarship on citizenship and nationality laws in Africa, including their historical antecedents and contemporary manifestations. Accessibly written and meticulously researched – based on references to a wide range of primary and secondary sources including archival material and qualitative interviews – this book provides a nuanced analysis of the evolution of citizenship in Africa, all the while accounting for the unique backstory of every single country on the continent.

Manby instructively opens up her exploration of the shifting dynamics of citizenship and nationality in Africa with three fictitious characters (cousins Georges, Samson and Lisa) – who have complex biographies and competing claims to the Mano River Union (MRU) sub-regional countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – as a means of illustrating how the lack of attention to nationality laws and their application has created ‘broader crises of citizenship in the continent’ (p. 5). Thus, Manby enters fraught debates about how formal rules shape belonging and participation. She sets out to demonstrate – and does so convincingly – the relevance of nationality laws in African polities, what impact they have on individual ‘rights, resources and representation’,Footnote ¹ and the role that legal reforms can play in shaping normative frameworks of the law at national, regional and global levels.

It is evident throughout Manby’s monograph that her scholarly arc bends towards justice. Given her background in investigating the dire consequences of statelessness in Africa, she makes a strong case for why citizenship and membership are human rights-based, political concerns as much as they are statutory, legal conundrums: ‘The substantive and procedural content of nationality laws can in itself either undermine the project of nation-building that has so bedevilled the continent or, alternatively, become a tool to use in that effort’ (p. 5).

Divided into five parts, Citizenship in Africa initially presents, in Part I, a review of the body of literature on citizenship generally and citizenship law in Africa specifically, from both legal and sociological perspectives. This is followed in Parts II and III by a detailed examination of how African nationality laws in particular have evolved from pre- to post-independence. Here, Manby (p. 38) highlights the pitfalls of maintaining Berlin conference-era territorial boundaries in Africa post-independence and their implications for citizenship given that ‘the substantive provisions of the law and the institutional frameworks for nationality administration have kept their colonial models’ embedded in British, French, Portuguese, Belgian, Spanish, etc. jurisprudence. Although colonial-inspired legal frameworks have resonances even in Liberia and Ethiopia, the only two countries in Africa that were never formally colonized by European powers, Manby maintains that post-independence citizenship on the continent remains fluid rather than fixed.

Rather than dwell on the well-established fact that Africa inherited citizenship regulations and norms as colonial relics,Footnote ² Manby instead delves into specific case studies in Part IV of how nationality laws have been amended, applied and/or manipulated in contemporary practice, with an incisive investigation of the legal and political consequences of these developments. Examples abound in Citizenship in Africa of post-independence political contestations in which nationality laws have been used as pretexts for disenfranchisement – from attempts to derail the presidential ambitions of mixed-heritage Alasane Ouattara of Côte d’Ivoire (pp. 199–221) and mixed-raced (Sierra Leonean and Lebanese) John Akar of Sierra Leone (pp. 164–76) to the expulsion of Asians in Idi Amin’s Uganda (pp. 176–81). In particular, Manby’s extended case study of Akar represents a relevant foundation for my previousFootnote ³ and ongoing research on the socio-economic development implications of ‘Negro’ clauses that prohibit non-blacks from acquiring citizenship in Liberia (by birth and naturalization) and Sierra Leone (by birth).

In Part V, Manby ends her book with an important exploration of the impacts of nationality laws on politics, on notions of belonging and identity, and on the possibilities of fashioning new citizenship futures on the continent of Africa. She concludes that trends in citizenship laws across the continent reveal more discontinuities than continuities and, where commonalities exist, they tend to mirror other regions of the globe by leaning ‘towards greater gender equality, and towards greater acceptance of dual nationality’ (p. 315). As such, Manby manages to poignantly illustrate Africa’s simultaneous exceptionalism and mundanity.

A significant contribution to the literature, this comprehensive and compelling book is a timeless resource that scholars, practitioners and policymakers will return to again and again to address the ways in which citizenship remains a continuum of inclusion and exclusion in Africa and further afield. Manby illustrates that Africa’s political, economic and social dynamism unsettles the post-Westphalian legal architecture of citizenship. It is this unsettling that makes the continent fertile ground for constructing citizenship anew.