When the plane took off with 49 Afrikaners from OR Tambo International Airport earlier this month, to start their new lives in the US, where they were inexplicably granted refugee status unprovoked, the unprecedented occurrence predictably got people in South Africa and around the world talking.
Many in SA expressed annoyance, while some expressed pity for the 49 who are discernibly pawns on the geopolitical chessboard.
Others simply wanted to know what the provisions of the South African Citizenship Act are. Some hoped that the “refugees” would lose their South African citizenship, for the act of betrayal against the republic.
The desire to see the 49 lose their citizenship sounded like an okay statement to make on social media, amid their baffling departure.
But that would be irrational of the government if it stripped the citizenship of those who left to the land of milk and honey.
South Africa has acted irrationally before on citizenship matters! Yet, the country should know better as it boasts some of the most painful citizenship stories in human history.
Just one week before the 49 left South Africa, the Constitutional Court ruled unconstitutional the part of the Citizenship Act that declared that South Africans who took up citizenships of other countries without seeking permission first from the government, automatically lost their citizenships.
The ruling upheld an earlier ruling by the Supreme Court of Appeals.
Minister of Home Affairs Dr Leon Schreiber immediately committed his department to abide by the court ruling, and take a step further to reinstate citizenships that were lost as a result of the three decades of unconstitutional parts of the Citizenship Act.
The 49 will, therefore, not be losing their citizenships, unless they renounce it themselves.
The ruling on citizenship is consistent with the desire to correct the painful legacy of South African citizenship. During apartheid many South Africans became stateless under painful circumstances.
Citizenship should be deemed a birth right, by any measure. Striping people of their citizenship should never be a subject that arises, even when the nation is baffled by departures in the mould of the “Amerikaners”’.
In 1964, Nat Nakasa, a South African journalist who worked for Drum magazine and also wrote a tantalising column in the Rand Daily Mail, needed to travel to the US for the Nieman Fellowship at Havard University, a life-changing opportunity by any account, especially for a black man in apartheid SA.
While his application forms were with the Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s office, he contemplated a scenario in which the application was declined. “Heaven knows, the last thing I want is an exit permit. I have seen enough of my friends leave the country on those things,” he wrote in his column.
“Some of them are now living as exiles in Europe, England and America. Nearly all of them write miserable letters reminiscing about the good old days in South Africa,” he added.
An exit permit was a document that the apartheid government issued to those among the oppressed whose applications for passports it turned down for no reason other than just thwart a desire to travel out of the country The document terminated your South African citizenship as soon as you walked beyond the immigration desk at the airport. By the time your flight took to the skies, you were stateless.
Nakasa’s fear predictably became a reality. His dejected assertion went: “Some time next week, with my exit permit in my bag, I shall cross the borders of the republic and immediately part company with my South African citizenship. I shall be doing what some of my friends have called ‘taking a grave step’,” he said in his subsequent column.
He died by suicide the following year in New York.
The tragic hurdles faced by Nakasa in relation to the citizenship was by no means confined to him alone or just a handful of ambitious black people who thought they could further their academic needs elsewhere in the world. It was government policy and applied to many.
Of course many more chose to cross the borders illegally and vanish into the unknown that awaited them.
Nakasa’s tragedy and many similar other stories should remind us that even when the desire to utter unutterable words aimed at the pawns of Donald Trump’s politics, it should not arise that those who are South African should ever cease to be citizens.
The ConCourt ruling earlier this month flushed out the remnants of old laws that stripped people of citizenship, and it should never happen again.
• Sydney Seshibedi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Pretoria
