Christiana Bukalo blends in with the colors of Munich's “Café Jasmin”: She is sitting on a green velvet sofa in front of a wall decorated with gold, wearing a green military jacket and gold earrings. It is, of course, pure coincidence, this combination of green and gold; But Christiana Bukalo had trained for years to blend in as much as possible with her surroundings. Then he tried to ignore what separated him from most other people.

Christiana Bukalo is stateless. He has no citizenship, which basically means that there is no country in this world to protect him and his rights. It seems a bit like the 29-year-old lives apart from what holds societies and their legal systems together: nation-states. And also from international communities based on the association of nation states.

Now it is the case that Christiana Bukalo was not born in a state-free area, but in 1994 in Germany, in a small town in Bavaria. He went to school there, then studied in Munich, where he also started his first job. When it comes to his nationality, it doesn't matter that Bukalo was born and raised in Germany. In Germany, citizenship is inherited – and so is statelessness.

This text is from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

Christiana Bukalo inherited it from her parents who migrated from West Africa to Germany before she was born and could not adequately prove which country they originally came from. As a child, he noticed that some things were different for him. For example, he was not allowed to go on youth trips or he had to apply to the regional office to take part in a school excursion. Otherwise, he rebuilt his life, graduated from high school and began a dual degree program. It wasn't until he was looking for an apartment of his own, had to re-register, and came into more and more contact with the authorities or the university that he realized that stateless people were rarely present in these official parts of society. Many of the drop-down menus didn't have the word “stateless,” officials didn't know the “XXX” in his passport stood for “undetermined nationality.” “Statelessness can be very isolating,” says Bukalo. He especially noticed this in 2019, when he had passed his exams, started working and wanted to go on vacation to Morocco for the first time.

At the airport, he felt ashamed

Christiana Bukalo asked if stateless people could enter the country; Unable to find any information, he wrote to the German immigration authorities and the Moroccan embassy, ​​but received no reply. He found a sentence on the Internet: People from Germany are allowed to enter Morocco. He thought he was from Germany and booked a trip. Passed through the Munich checkpoint, got on the plane until he was standing at Marrakech airport and the officer didn't understand what ID he had in front of him. He did not have a German identity card or passport, but he listed his country of origin as Germany. More and more officers were called, five or six armed men, says Bukalo. The men, who at some point said he had to go back, booked him a flight to Dusseldorf and brought him to the gate. The plane arrived the next day, he slept on the bench and waited for the flight to take off. He thought at the time that he would never get on a plane again, he felt so much fear and shame.

In Düsseldorf, he booked a bus to Munich. And started googling: he found that the number was well over 100,000, that's how many stateless people Germany should have. For the first time, he also asked himself: where are they all? And why don't I know about them? He could not find an institution in Germany that would deal with his situation.

On this bus ride, Bukalo chose a different way to deal with his statelessness. From then on, he no longer hid them, but illuminated them, initially only through the flashing mobile phone screen in the dark night bus. He started an online forum, which was still anonymous at the time, to find other stateless people in Germany. The forum became a non-governmental organization in 2021, with Christiana Bukalo as its face. He quit his job and today he only works for “Statefree World”.