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As an ethnic minority the Nubians of Kenya are struggling for equal
citizenship by asserting themselves as indigenous and autochthonous
to Kibera, one of Nairobi's most notorious slums. Having settled
there after being brought by the British colonial authorities from
Sudan as soldiers, this appears a peculiar claim to make. It is a
claim that illuminates the hierarchical nature of Kenya's
ethnicised citizenship regime and the multi-faceted nature of
citizenship itself. This book explores two kinds of citizenship
deficits; those experienced by the Nubians in Kenya and, more
centrally, those which represent the limits of citizenship
theories. The author argues for an understanding of citizenship as
made up of multiple component parts: status, rights and membership,
which are often disaggregated through time, across geographic
spaces and amongst different people. This departure from a unitary
language of citizenship allows a novel analysis of the central role
of ethnicity in the recognition of political membership and
distribution of political goods in Kenya. Such an analysis
generates important insights into the risks and possibilities of a
relationship between ethnicity and democracy that is of broad,
global relevance.
As an ethnic minority the Nubians of Kenya are struggling for equal
citizenship by asserting themselves as indigenous and autochthonous
to Kibera, one of Nairobi's most notorious slums. Having settled
there after being brought by the British colonial authorities from
Sudan as soldiers, this appears a peculiar claim to make. It is a
claim that illuminates the hierarchical nature of Kenya's
ethnicised citizenship regime and the multi-faceted nature of
citizenship itself. This book explores two kinds of citizenship
deficits; those experienced by the Nubians in Kenya and, more
centrally, those which represent the limits of citizenship
theories. The author argues for an understanding of citizenship as
made up of multiple component parts: status, rights and membership,
which are often disaggregated through time, across geographic
spaces and amongst different people. This departure from a unitary
language of citizenship allows a novel analysis of the central role
of ethnicity in the recognition of political membership and
distribution of political goods in Kenya. Such an analysis
generates important insights into the risks and possibilities of a
relationship between ethnicity and democracy that is of broad,
global relevance.
Africa, it is often said, is suffering from a crisis of
citizenship. At the heart of the contemporary debates this apparent
crisis has provoked lie dynamic relations between the present and
the past, between political theory and political practice, and
between legal categories and lived experience. Yet studies of
citizenship in Africa have often tended to foreshorten historical
time and privilege the present at the expense of the deeper past.
Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa provides
a critical reflection on citizenship in Africa by bringing together
scholars working with very different case studies and with very
different understandings of what is meant by citizenship. By
bringing historians and social scientists into dialogue within the
same volume, it argues that a revised reading of the past can offer
powerful new perspectives on the present, in ways that might also
indicate new paths for the future. The project collects the works
of up-and-coming and established scholars from around the globe.
Presenting case studies from such wide-ranging countries as Sudan,
Mauritius, South Africa, Cote d'Ivoire, and Ethiopia, the essays
delve into the many facets of citizenship and agency as they have
been expressed in the colonial and postcolonial eras. In so doing,
they engage in exciting ways with the watershed book in the field,
Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject. Contributors: Samantha
Balaton-Chrimes, Frederick Cooper, Solomon M. Gofie, V. Adefemi
Isumonah, Cherry Leonardi, John Lonsdale, Eghosa E.Osaghae, Ramola
Ramtohul, Aidan Russell, Nicole Ulrich, Chris Vaughan, and
Henri-Michel Yere.
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