Beauty queen fights deportation, insists she was born in South Africa

Chidimma Adetshina was born in Soweto, she says. She grew up in Cape Town. She is 25 years old, a law student, and until recently a beauty pageant contestant. She is also, according to South African authorities, a prohibited person facing deportation from the only country she claims as home.

The trouble began in 2024 when Adetshina entered the Miss South Africa competition. Her participation triggered immediate questions about her eligibility. Her mother has Mozambican roots. Her father is Nigerian. Within weeks, officials revoked her South African identity and travel documents, citing concerns that her mother, Anabela Rungo, had committed identity fraud to obtain South African citizenship. The pageant withdrew her candidacy. Adetshina left the country.

She went to Nigeria and was invited to compete in Miss Universe Nigeria, which she won. But in June of this year, she was arrested upon attempting to re-enter South Africa, accused of crossing the border unlawfully through a Mozambican post. She was released on warning. Now the government is pursuing her detention and deportation, arguing in court that her applications for a South African visa while in Nigeria—and her subsequent acquisition of Nigerian passports for herself and her son—prove she was never a South African citizen at all.

The legal architecture of citizenship, however, does not work the way Adetshina's birthplace alone would suggest. Being born in South Africa does not automatically confer citizenship. One parent must either be a citizen or a permanent resident. Rungo's South African citizenship was revoked in 2025, following the fraud investigation. This left Adetshina in a legal void: born in the country, but potentially without the parental documentation required to claim it.

On Wednesday, following a hearing in Cape Town, Adetshina spoke to reporters with visible frustration. She said she had been treated unfairly and targeted, that authorities were making an example of her case. "I remind everyone that I was born in South Africa," she said. "I have applied through the proper legal channels to have my status and citizenship determined." She also addressed the protesters gathered outside the courthouse—members of an anti-migrant organization called March and March, which has made undocumented migration a central cause. "We should not allow xenophobia and misinformation to determine how people are going to be treated," she said. Some of the protesters chased her car as she left.

The government's legal case seeking her detention has been postponed until February 2027, giving time for her administrative review challenging the deportation order to proceed. Until that review is completed, Adetshina remains free. She is caught in a peculiar limbo: a woman claiming birthright in a place that claims she has no right to be there, waiting for the law to decide whether the place where she was born will let her stay.