By Jedi Ramalapa<\/p>\n
There is a quiet kind of violence that states are particularly good at. It does not arrive with spectacle. It comes through paperwork. Through silence. Through the slow, bureaucratic unmaking of a life. In 2018, that violence found Animu Athiei, who was at the time a speech writer in the office of then First Vice President Taban Deng Gai, when her nationality was arbitrarily revoked<\/a> by the South Sudan Directorate of Nationality, Passport and Immigration (DNPI).\u00a0 There was no due process. No substantiated evidence. Just a claim that she was not who she said she was. That she did not belong. And with that, the state did what it has always done, especially to women who step into power: it erased her.<\/p>\n African feminists have long argued that contemporary citizenship is not simply legal; it is colonial, political, contested, and deeply gendered. In works like Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity<\/i> <\/a>, Prof. Amina Mama interrogates how African states remain structured by patriarchal power, where citizenship is not neutral but deeply political. Similarly, Prof. Sylvia Tamale in \u00a0Decolonization and Afro-Feminism<\/i><\/a>, pushes us to understand how law and identity in Africa remain entangled with colonial legacies that regulate bodies, belonging, and legitimacy. Within this framework, citizenship becomes a tool not just for inclusion but also for control.<\/p>\n Animu was born in 1983 to South Sudanese parents from Morobo County, now Central Equatorial State. When civil war broke out a few months later, her family fled to neighbouring Uganda, where she lived until she returned to South Sudan in 2012. According to court documents, in 2014, she was legally granted her South Sudanese nationality endorsement by her uncle, Ofeni Ngota Amitai, who stood in for her father, who died when Animu was 13 years old.<\/p>\n Post-independence states inherited colonial systems that turned belonging into something to be documented, verified, and, when necessary, withdrawn. Within these systems, women have remained particularly vulnerable. Across most of Africa, nationality has often been mediated through patriarchy<\/a> \u2013 through fathers, husbands, and lineage. Even where laws have changed, practice has not fully followed. Women are still asked, in subtle and overt ways, to prove their belonging. Today, there are still countries that deny or make it difficult for a mother to pass on citizenship to her children on an equal basis with men.<\/p>\n