From prohibited immigrants to citizens

Since 2008, South Africa has witnessed horrific xenophobic attacks on its foreign citizens. There have been many explanations for why the violence emerged, one of which relates to ideas about lawful citizenship and legal residence. This book explains the making of South African citizenship. It traces and provides the history of the mobility-related laws for the constituent South African populations in the early 1900s: European, Indian and African. Control over human mobility, while always understood to be crucial to apartheid through the pass laws, was equally - if not more - significant in the formation of South Africa and South African citizenship. Specifically, the author argues that the regulation and administration of the Asian population is the direct predecessor of the current South African Department of Home Affairs and provided the key platform for the elaboration and consolidation of the official vision of a unified (albeit structurally unequal) South African population. Paradoxically, without this, apartheid would have been impossible. No other study provides a legal history of immigration and migration in this crucial period in the making of South Africa. This study goes beyond standard and competing accounts of white or black nationalism in South Africa: it intriguingly and uniquely argues that the legal culture of South African citizenship has its origins in the Asian population and its encounters with the emerging South African state. The final chapter brings the history to bear on contemporary migration and citizenship issues.