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Yasiin Bey wants to go home. The Brooklyn-born rapper has been living in South Africa for the last two years, and he’s still not welcome back in the U.S. due to “legal and immigration issues.”
He attempted to leave South Africa this past week, but instead of a U.S. passport, he gave airport security a World Passport. That wasn’t reason enough to detain him. The real problems came when it was revealed his family had overstayed their visas. The rapper formerly known as Mos Def has been charged with fraud, and now Bey and his family have one week to leave the country.
In response, Yasiin took over Kanye West’s website to share a ten-minute freestyle/message, mentioning something called the World Service Authority in the process. We spoke to WSA President David Gallup, who said, “[Bey] is using the court of public opinion to deal with the violation of rights by the South African government. And that has a lot of power.”
Bey has left South Africa as many as ten times in recent years, and his most recent visitor’s visa doesn’t expire until the end of February. But they won’t let him leave with the World Passport. So what the hell is a World Passport?
It all starts with the man in the below video. (Tl;dr—he gets through the Canadian-U.S. border with a World Passport).
That’s Garry Davis—WWII vet, Broadway actor, and peace activist. He started the non-profit World Service Authority in 1954, which claims to defend “your fundamental human right to freedom of travel.”
The WSA began making World Passports, and has issued over half a million in its 60+ years of existence. Davis pushed the passport for years during his travels, and was arrested dozens of times as a result.
Garry Davis passed away in 2013. These days, David Gallup runs the WSA, and he had some things to say about Bey’s situation:
“A fraudulent document is one that ‘willfully intends to deceive.’ The World Passport is meant only to be a World Passport, nothing more and nothing less… Because the passport presents itself as what it is—and not ‘pretending’ to be a national governmental document—it cannot be considered ‘fraudulent.’
Please note that the South African government has no law against the World Passport. Whatever is not prohibited by law is allowed by law. Because they have no law against specifically the World Passport, they must recognize it.”
The movement, however, has not caught on with many national governments. The World Passport is only recognized in a handful of countries (Ecuador, Tanzania, Mauritania, Zambia, Burkina Faso, The Vatican, and Togo), and proof of their acceptance—scanned documents from the nations’ governments—dates back to 1954. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are purportedly among those in possession of a World Passport.
But they probably never tried to use it at the airport—in that regard, Yasiin never had much of a chance. From Wikipedia: “Success in crossing a border using a World Passport is generally attributable to the whim or ignorance of individual immigration officers, not official recognition of the document. As a result, traveling on a World Passport has never been easy.”
For now, Bey is scheduled to appear in court on March 8. We’ll update as the story progresses.
