Citizenship in Neo-Patrilineal States: Gender and Mobility in Southern Africa

Cheater, Angela P.; Gaidzanwa, R.B.

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Title:	Citizenship in Neo-Patrilineal States: Gender and Mobility in Southern Africa
Authors:	Cheater, Angela P. Gaidzanwa, R.B.
Year:	1996
Periodical:	Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume:	22
Issue:	2
Period:	June
Pages:	189-200
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Southern Africa
Subjects:	women migrants nationality women traders women Women's Issues Law, Human Rights and Violence Law, Legal Issues, and Human Rights Marital Relations and Nuptiality Politics and Government
External link:	https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637056
Abstract:	Following independence, many States in southern Africa modified their rules of access to citizenship, moving from the territorial model of 'ius soli' to the more exclusive, descent-based model of 'ius sanguinis', in a specifically patrilineal mode which explicitly rejects bilateral principles. This paper looks at the situation of southern African black women who marry across, and those who on informal trade move extensively across, State boundaries, and their position in relation to the new patribased citizenship rules. It argues that the prevailing constructions of the State and its citizenship in southern Africa are those of black men of the dominant classes. These constructions ignore the real differences between men's and women's experiences of social and economic citizenship within nations and residential communities. As a result of this hegemony of male-defined norms of and criteria for citizenship, women's relationships to space, time and mobility are denied validity in ways that appear intended to undermine female economic initiatives. Women who can have followed their precolonial traditions of 'voting with their feet' against oppressive power, to become citizens of economic networks that transcend the political boundaries of the region's nation-States. Notes, ref., sum.

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