In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on developing community management in land tenure systems. These approaches stress the value and appropriateness of customary management systems. They stress that two systems of land management exist: the formal system, based on state management, and land titling and the informal system based on local institutions and customary rights, which may adapt to changing conditions. This paper examines the concept of customary land tenure critically.
Based on a study of the Akyem Abuakwa traditional state in Ghana, it is argued that the notions of customary land tenure were largely established in the colonial period in the context of Native Administration or Indirect Rule. One of the underlying concerns with indirect rule was to control movement of labour for public works and the colonial enclaves and to control land and the emergence of a class of land speculators dominating an indigenous market in land by creating an alliance with paramount chiefs. Indirect rule thus buttressed the power of chiefs to control land and labour.
In the Akyem Abuakwa area, prior to the emergence of Native Administration, the control of the paramount chief of Akyem (Okyehene) over land was extremely tenuous. The Okyehene established control over the area through the defeat of the Akwamu in the eighteenth century. However, the paramount chiefs of Akyem Abuakwa were unable to establish control over all areas of the territory they claimed. Many areas of Akyem Abuakwa did not come under the authority of the Okyehene in the nineteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, the abolishment of slavery also created a crisis in Akyem as farm labour abandoned the plantations of their former owners.
From the 1840s onwards, Akyem Abuakwa began to sell large plots of land to the Akuapem and Krobo, which were used to develop first the export oil palm industry and later cocoa. These land markets preceded the development of colonial rule. In an effort to gain control over land markets, the colonial government granted new powers to the Okyehene over land administration, in an area rich in agricultural land, gold, diamond and timber. The Akyem Abuakwa royal family reinvented the Akyem Abuakwa state, essentially creating a modern state based on an idealised conception of Akyem tradition, which buttressed concession granting and various other forms of realising land rents. The early migrations of Krobo and Akuapem were followed by migrations of tax-paying labour from Niger, Burkina Faso, northern Togo and northern Ghana seeking work to pay off tax obligations. These migrants were incorporated into the cocoa industry of Akyem in variations of sharecrop contracts. Sharecropping became a dominant land relationship in Akyem Abuakwa, and migrants became the dominant population. In the late colonial period, it was recognised that Native Administration in Akyem Abuakwa was a travesty, since the dominant population were migrants. Akyem Abuakwa became a major area of agitation for independence, and of a struggle against the Native Authority system and chiefs. Here, during the 1950s, many chiefs were destooled.
Following independence, land reforms were not introduced, since government realised the advantage of using chiefs to administer land and to alienate land on behalf of government. By recognising powers of chiefs over land, government has been able to appropriate large areas of land for the state, for joint state-private enterprise, and state-approved private ventures. This alliance between chiefs and the nation-state is not recognised in much of the discourse on customary and community landrights.
The paper examines how that which is defined as the customary is a product of power relations between chiefs, subjects, migrants and the state. Land relations have frequently been defined by labour relations. However, these relationships usually are absent from the legal framework on customary land law, which roots the customary in some essentialist cultural and religious framework. The paper shows how land relations have been transformed by changing labour relations, as well as how these relationships are not recognised in frameworks which define land relations as customary and customary land law as rooted in tradition.
The term 'forest rent' comes from the economist Jean-Francois Ruf, who coined it specifically for cocoa, defining it as the difference between the cost of production on land newly-cleared from forest, and the cost of production on land which has already been used for farming. Thus, it represents the economic value of the natural resources consumed by one cycle of cocoa farming. In a book that I'm revising for publication early next year (by University of Rochester Press), I extend the notion, coining the phrase 'broad forest rent' to refer to all the natural resources specific to the Asante forest zone (kola, rubber, and indeed gold, though the presence of the latter was of course chance, unrelated to vegetation). Exclusive possession of these resources - through, in effect, monopoly landrights - was originally secured by the military power of the Asante state, enabling it to convert 'forest rent' into 'economic rent' in the Ricardian sense. This commercial advantage, based upon military and political arrangements to take advantage of geography, enabled Asante household heads, etc. to 'purchase' slaves in the nineteenth century, and to pay wages in the twentieth: the labourers coming, in both cases, from Asante's northern savanna hinterland, precisely because (at one level) of the absence of comparable resources at home. So I argue and detail in the book, anyway.
In the paper, I propose to reflect on the implications of this for communal/ethnic identities, assimilation, non-assimilation etc; and on the implications of the contrast between the Asante (and, to a large extent, Ghana) case and the Ivorian one. While the colonial and post-colonial states in Ghana have basically upheld landrights systems which have made it extremely difficult for people from the savannah to acquire rights over forest resources; Houphouët's policy has not. It is ironic, perhaps, that the north-south divide has never been such an emotive issue in post-colonial politics in Ghana as it has been recently in Cote d'Ivoire.
Throughout West Africa, land scarcity, insecurity and economic inequality have combined in recent years to engender increasing competition over rights to land, raising the stakes in both land acquisition and claims to authority over allocations and transfers of landrights. Drawing on my own and others' recent research, in Ghana and elsewhere in West Africa, this paper reflects on the way competition over land is shaping struggles over authority and boundaries of social belonging, at both local and supralocal levels of interaction. How are state and international projects of property rights 'reform' influencing struggles over property and authority? How are they appropriated and re-fashioned by those whose activities they are supposed to stabilize and/or discipline? How are criteria of belonging—citizenship, kinship, tradition, expertise—being reified and/or redefined through people's efforts to acquire and use land, and how do they influence the outcomes? The aim of this paper is not to present or defend a particular set of conclusions, but to draw on the growing body of recent empirically grounded research to review the kinds of questions we are asking about landrights and social exclusion, and suggest lines of further inquiry.
The paper provides an overview of the interplay between the dynamic use of ethnic identity and the allocation of landrights in the Sefwi Wiawso and Juabeso Bia districts of the Western Region of Ghana. A Sefwi political and ethnic identity was first documented in the early nineteenth century with the emergence of partly autonomous political units sharing some distinctive cultural traits. Early twentieth century Sefwi social and economic structure was based on the assimilation in subordinate positions of incoming, foreign elements: immigrant groups were received and inserted within the political structure; slaves were often incorporated within domestic groups. Chiefs and domestic heads practiced and benefited from an inclusive politics of belonging. Land utilisation was then based principally on slash and burn farming, with gathering and hunting carried out mostly for domestic purposes. Even though gold, rubber, ivory and skins were exported in the early twentieth century the size of the trade was limited. Chiefly control of land-use was both ideological – with chiefs being recognised as the owners of the land and of its products - and economic –with chiefs drawing a share of the produce.
At the turn of the century, colonial rule and the introduction of cocoa farming produced a redefinition of the relationship between landrights and the management of identity. The colonial administration allocated landrights to the chiefly establishment as part of its policy of indirect rule. Chiefs found themselves receiving unprecedented benefits from the exercise of land tenurial prerogatives. In the early twentieth century, the gold rush reached Sefwi with chiefs being offered thousands of pounds for mining rights. Later, timber firms procured their felling rights by paying rents. There was a growing demand for agricultural rights as farmers increasingly turned to cocoa production. While mining and timber rights were allocated to foreign firms without reservations, as natural resources were thought to belong to chiefs, agricultural rights required a redefinition to adjust to cash crop farming. Pre-colonial agriculture was virtually not taxed and crops could hardly be considered a 'natural' product of the land. Chiefs, however, did not wish to relinquish such an attractive source of revenue as the one of the expanding farming business. They decided that agricultural rights could be acquired for free by the indigenous population, while immigrant farmers –who were rapidly pouring into the district in search of fertile land- would have to pay for their agricultural rights.
The combination of colonial and chiefly policies produced what could be termed an economy of extraction. It was based on the removal and export of non-renewable natural resources (minerals, rubber, timber and land fertility) and on the extraction of immigrant farmers' labour and wealth by their indigenous landlord. In this context, ethnic definition became a crucial criterion which regulated the mode of involvement in the productive process: while foreign farm owners were taxed, a growing number of immigrants who could not purchase their access to farming rights worked as labourers, sharecroppers or sharetenants.
An economy of extraction is doomed to be short-lived and to create tension in the long term. By the end of the twentieth century, some contradictions came to the forefront. On the one hand, as a consequence of the rapid population growth and the exhaustion of available agricultural land, the confrontation between the indigenous population and immigrants over the issue of agricultural taxation turned violent. On the other hand, the outlook for Sefwi economy seems grim. The cocoa yield is decreasing; and the timber industry is suffering from the exhaustion of trees. The irrational separation of timber rights and farming rights has led to the depletion of timber resources. Timber rights were sold to firms on the land on which farmers practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. As farmers had no stake in the timber standing on their farm, this was systematically destroyed. For every new farm that was cleared, timber valued at several hundred dollars was felled and burnt or left to rot. The value of the timber destroyed often exceeded the farmers' yearly cocoa revenue. While there are talks under way to assign the ownership of timber to indigenous farmers, there is resistance to the inclusion of foreign tenants in the project.
Since the colonial period, the agrarian history of the forest belt in the Côte d'Ivoire has been characterised among others things, by the diffusion of perennial cultures (coffee and cocoa), by a massive movement of agricultural colonisation by migrants from other regions of the country and from nearby countries, as well as, especially since independence, by a strong intervention of the State in the mise en valeur of the western regions (among which is the Gban region) notably by encouraging access to land for these migrants.
The settlement of these migrants took place -and continues to take place- under the system of traditional client-relations with autochthonous 'landowners', relations which can be referred to as - according to the local term – 'tutorat'. The autochthones welcome the migrants, ease their social and political integration and give them access to land to provide for their subsistence and that of their families. In return, the migrants have to regard them as their 'tutors', 'landlords', 'benefactors', 'bosses', 'fathers', with the symbolic, social and economic obligations that are associated with the obligation of 'gratitude'. This 'tutelage relation' has implications at different levels: inter-individual, inter-family, intercommunity. Besides, it has an important time dimension: it passes down in the course of generations between autochthonous and migrant families and communities.
Since independence, the state of Côte d'Ivoire widely mobilised the traditional institution of tutelage to implement its land-tenure policy, without much regard for the official legislation provisions. Under the leadership of President Houphouët-Boigny, the state itself referred to tutelage to encourage the autochthones to welcome migrants to the - under exploited - western forests, while emphasizing that "land belongs to the one who tills it". Today, the government is turning, once again, to the tutelage institution, but in a different way. The implementation of new legislation concerning rural land presumes identification and registration of customary rights, thus favouring autochthony as a basis of legitimacy for appropriation rights. Besides, the law provides for legal formalisation of the landrights acquired by the migrants, hitherto governed by the tutelage institution, excluding non-citizens of Côte d'Ivoire from land property.
However, the traditional institution of land 'tutelage' has undergone many alterations, both in its economic and social contents and in the identity and political values, which it brings into play. This paper aims at analysing - relying on historical and empirical data - the dynamics of the tutelage institution in a significant region of the social, economic and political history of the plantation agriculture in Côte d'Ivoire since the 1950s. The analysis aims to account for several closely interconnected layers of change within this dynamic.
A first layer is connected to resource and landrights integration within the political economy of the 'coffee-cocoa complex' in Côte d'Ivoire. Over the course of time and over several generations of autochthones, former and new migrants, the social and economic compensation of these transfers of land-use rights (over periods corresponding at least to the trees' life cycle, i.e. the equivalent of a human generation), have been monetised and contractualised even becoming in roughly the past twenty years real purchase-sale deals, without reference to traditional tutelage disappearing. Particular meanings of tutelage, in the subsistence-oriented peasant moral economy, have been superimposed on the stake of redefining landrights within a commercial logic. Tutelage is considered in the local mode of thinking, as a frame for a derived right of land-use, combined with social conventions considered to be self-evident. It is also seen, in the context of social relationships, as a bundle of rights (of access to natural resources, of use, management, organisation, inclusion and exclusion, transfer, dispossession), the conflictual negotiation of which leads to redefining the whole property regime.
The second layer of change concerns the political anthropology of the domestic domain in a multi-ethnic situation. Tutelage contractualisation and its implications in land-use, stand in close relation to changes in the relationships inside families and between generations, both within the autochthonous and migrant populations. Numerous land conflicts especially among autochthones and migrants, are not dissociable from intra-domestic and intergenerational tensions, in which urban nationals of the autochthonous populations also participate.
The third layer is that of the political anthropology of relationships between the state of Côte d'Ivoire and the multi-ethnic local societies. The management of tutelage became an explicit political stake for the various instances of local power: village authorities, notables and local politicians, home-town associations, migrant organisations based on ethnic and national origin, and territorial, agrarian and judicial state services. The politicisation of the land issue in Côte d'Ivoire and the forthcoming implementation of a new land law (loi sur le domaine foncier rural) reinforce tutelage as a central issue in redefining membership criteria for local, ethnic and national communities, which ensure the authority, effectiveness and sustainability of landrights.
The current debate over landrights and land tenure systems is heavily focused on farming and other 'landed' societies and authorities. With our paper we want to shift the attention to more marginal groups that have only rather recently come to play their role in the plight for landrights.
As we regard this to be transnational phenomenon, rather than only a local concern, we will tackle this question under a comparative perspective. We will depict the present situation of land access and land property rights among the pastoral Fulbe in Northwest Cameroon and in Burkina Faso – both within the framework of the respective socio-political, economic and legal structures and of individual and group strategies. The Fulbe pastoralists' approach to land differs considerably from that of the farming population: land, within the ethnic context, seemed not to be an asset in and of itself; access to natural resources was not tied to territorial ownership, and wealth primarily stemmed from mobile goods, namely cattle. The pastoralists' motivations and strategies to acquire land have to be analysed with this in mind. We will show how – and also why – landownership is achieved. In the comparative analysis we will look at the disparities between strategies pursued, factual modes of acquisition and perspectives of how land-ownership can be incorporated into the existing pastoralists' social system and property regime.
It is vital to analyse the land-question as one embedded in its political and historical background in order to understand major differences between the two research sites; this includes pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial arrangements as well as contemporary governmental and NGO policies interfering in the distribution of land. In the final part of the argument, we will relate modes of land acquisition to the question of changing identities and examine how self-ascription and ascription by others, wealth and mobility change in the course of these processes.
Pastoral migrations from Sahelian areas into West African sub-humid zones occurred for ecological reasons. In the early 1960s, Fulbe cattle-herders from Burkina Faso and Mali, in search of pastures, entered Côte d'Ivoire and settled among the Senufo in the northern region of the country. The Fulbe newcomers obtained rights of access to land through arrangements and cooperation with the Senufo agriculturalists who entrust the Fulbe with the supervision of the village cattle. This also occurred in accordance with a belief that the autochthons should not deny immigrants the right to use a plot of land (tar). The Senufo earth priest (tarfolo) acts as mediator between divinities, ancestors and newcomers who join the village society, the last of which might also be evicted from the land if they neglect their ritual duties. Since the death of President Houphouët in 1993, the land-use of many Fulbe has been strongly contested on political grounds. Pastoralist-agriculturalist relations are thus highly politicised. Faced with the growing land scarcity, the solution for some autochthonous farmers is the eviction of the Fulbe from their land, in order to appropriate corals fertilised with manure. In 1994, the Ivorian government launched the Rural Land Plan project to find a solution to the land crisis. According to the new law passed on December 1998, only Ivorian citizens can be landowners.
The paper will deal with the access to and the use of land by the Fulbe and their changing relations with agriculturalists in the northern district of Boundiali. The impact of the new land policy on pastoralist-farmer interactions will also be examined.
Due to legal pluralism, ownership and use of forestland in Benin's forest region of Bassila are contested by various actors. This situation is aggravated by the current process of political decentralisation, in which ownership and management of natural resources are to be be subjected to communal and village control.
The question of who owns the forest is especially relevant in the Bassila region, since local forest use is characterised by commercially-oriented illegal logging and corrupt activities carried out by state forest service agents, leading to rapid depletion of forest resources. Here, we analyse the concepts of illegality and theft under both the legal perspective of the state and under the local perspective (are forests conceived as a possible target for theft and which kinds of duties and expectations are attributed to state officials and local authorities). According to the autochthonous land tenure system of the Bassila region, forests and land are collectively owned by patrinlineages. Under this system, the lineage head is the administrator of forests and land for the male lineage members who hold permanent wide-ranging use rights. This local conception of tenure clashes with the legal one held by the state of Benin, which defines forests as state property, giving out very restricted usufruct rights. For local people, however, the state's control over forests constitutes illegal expropriation.
An example: owning and using forêts classées in the Bassila region.
In the 1940's and 1950's, some forestland was on the national level transformed into state forest reserves (forêts classées). The delineation of Bassila and Pénéssoulou as forêt classée was conceived as an illegitimate expropriation by the local population. Thus, hunting by the original owners and collecting by their wives continued to be considered legal by the population, but not so by the administration. With its policing style, the state forest service expelled local users, including members of the original landowners' lineage, from the two forest reserves. Until 1987, when a new Forest Code became effective, hunting, agriculture, logging and the collection of non-timber forest products became illegal. Local users, who continued this kind of use, became illegal trespassers and had to fear sanctions. When cashew trees, planted in the forêts classées by the government, started to bear fruit, illegal fruit collecting (illegal from the administration's point of view) became an issue.
The controversy ended when the state stopped harvesting cashew due to a deficit in this badly managed sector. In 1974, a popular assembly led by the new socialist mayor of Bassila, which from then on met every year, abolished the original landowners' right to be informed when somebody else wanted to use it. They lost the exclusive right to use trees or to cut them, and their protest found no support. From 1975 on, the money collected in the yearly assembly allowed the commune to create public property. A maison de la culture was the first such initiative. In 1979, collectively managed forests began to be established. The general assembly decided that the state's cashew plantation should become a communal one. The state did not react and the population from then on mobilised once a year to harvest the plantation. The profit went into the commune's budget. In 1997, the state decided to privatise the plantation, whereupon it began to prohibit collecting and sanction trespassers. However, some young women and men from the old land-owning lineage went into the plantation to steal nuts. During the entire period of communal holding, however, not a single infringement concerning communal property was reported. The sanction of being publicly exposed in the general assembly proved to be an effective threat. Thus, both personal interest and sanction capacity appear as factors, which allow for change or maintenance of a specific property right as a legitimate one.
Our empirical data on current logging activities also show that endogenous concepts of illegality and corruption vary depending on the individual's role and interests. The ones who profit from logging positively comment on the state foresters. The ones excluded from the profit of logging (the majority of the local population) blame foresters, loggers and lineage headmen for the current 'anarchical' mode of logging, as well as for the negative effects of rapid deforestation (i.e. degraded soil, less rainfall and lack in non-timber-forest products). Thus, even in the face of legal pluralism, theft of trees and forests constitutes a locally recognised concept.
A German-funded forestry project is trying to curb the rapid rate of deforestation by promoting sustainable forestry for state reserves and private forests in the region. However, due to the persisting ambiguity and insecurity of forest property rights, local people are hesitant to invest in reproduction: they fear the expropriation of their forests by the state after the project ends.
Our investigations show that the legitimacy of and the respect for forest property rights and protective regulations are flexible. Although collective ownership, including state ownership, appears to be weak on the local level (due to forced expropriation), it can be effectively stabilised as the example of Bassila's cashew plantation has shown for a period.
According to local cosmology, it is unthinkable to sell land in most rural societies in Burkina Faso. Yet, daily practice observed in many settings suggests the opposite. Access to land is a recurrent subject of negotiations that often involve money transactions. The Master of the Earth and other key actors in the rural setting have become increasingly apt to give away land to resourceful persons in exchange for various kinds of 'gifts' in money or in kind. Land is not sold on the market as such, because the 'clients' first have to establish and maintain good relations with these key local actors. While cosmologically land cannot be sold, there is an emerging market for rural land in Burkina Faso. Yet there is at the same time an increasing emphasis among 'first-comers' (or autochthones) to keep land within the family, because otherwise there will simply not be enough land for the children and grandchildren. The argument is that the land of the ancestors should not be sold off to 'strangers'. Such discourses of 'autochthony' place a political barrier to land transactions, while debates over landrights occur at the interface of tradition and modernity.
This paper develops a case-study on struggles over landrights within the family of autochthones, that is, those who are generally recognised as legitimate stewards of land. In the scholarly literature, land conflicts tend to be framed in the context of power relations between autochthones and allocthones, while less attention is usually paid to internal struggles among autochthones themselves. The case-study analyses how a man (Bwa), who has been acting as Master of the Earth in a rural town in western Burkina Faso, is accused by his family of violating the rituals by selling land. But Bwa could also be understood as a broker who has been ingeniously bridging tradition and modernity. He has mediated between resourceful outsiders' need for land and the legitimacy of distributing land that tradition confers him.
Bwa's authority has recently been challenged. He is accused of selling the farmland of future generations to strangers and of not putting the money he has gained to good use. Other family members have even begun challenging Bwa's legitimacy and claiming the legitimate Master of the Earth to be Moussa, an elder 'brother' (son of his maternal uncle) of Bwa's. Yet contrary to Bwa, Moussa is a fervent Muslim and land rituals are said to 'spoil the prayer'. The paper concludes by analysing how land transactions are occurring in a space where issues of money, ritual and belonging are politically significant, economically rewarding and cosmologically dangerous.
The Phuo in South-western Burkina Faso, a minority group without centralized political institutions, like most Burkinabè, live in a rural area largely untouched by administrative land law and recent decentralisation reforms. Farmland is still a comparatively abundant resource and access to it is regulated through the villages' earth priest and a few lineage elders. In recent years, increasing pressure on land resources through incoming Dagara farmers, and more recently, farmers from the Moose ethnic group have given new impetus to latent conflicts among the Phuo, thus initiating new discourses about autochthony, hereditary rights and commercialisation. The fact that there are two different ways to legitimate the office holder illustrates the great deal of normative plurality that coexists within so- called 'customary law'.
First, a widespread normative discourse gives pre-eminence to the first-comer lineage whose ancestors were the founders of a settlement and who enjoy a special relationship with the earth god. In a society without the need to legitimise centralised political institutions this question is among the few stakes that makes history worth being remembered. Orality and diverging interest potentially lead to a number of different historical interpretations and the paper will look into the micro-politics of oral tradition surrounding the office of the earth priest.
The second means of legitimating the office of the earth priest follows a line of argument giving pre-eminence to certain ritually specialised clans, some of them being regarded as having an inherited special relationship to the earth god even if they are late-comers. Furthermore the unsteady migration and settlement history required sometimes that ritual competence be handed over for the benefit of other clans, thus creating two categories of office holders with overlapping competencies.
The notion that there is abundant land in Northern Ghana available to all comers is beginning to be questioned by students interested in land tenure regimes of communities of the area. In the particular case of communities of the Upper West Region, the notion until two decades ago has been that access to land, regardless of one's social status or ethnic origin, was unproblematic. In the present times, however, there has been an upsurge, if not proliferation of conflicts, over landrights among the Upper West communities. The ease with which one can access land for purposes of building or farming in the area is dependent on whether one belongs to the category of first-comers or late-comers. Also, being a first-comer or late-comer has implications for the type of rights one can assert and the security of tenure associated with such rights. Beyond the landrights enjoyed by the two extreme categories (first-comers and late-comers) are intermediary rights over land, which range from freeholds according to both customary and common law, leases, common rights over pastures, fishing and hunting grounds, rights over economic trees, licenses or even adverse possession. What is particularly problematic about these multiple rights among the Upper West communities is that all these rights can be nested very much like a Chinese doll in one piece of land. Associated with the multiple layers of landrights are also different tenure rules and terminology, which vary equally between state law discourses and the perceptions of the local communities. In this web of tenure rules on land, it is often difficult to ascertain the particular tenure regimes the adversaries invoke, when conflicts over landrights arise.
It is the opinion of this paper that more often than not adversaries in land conflicts speak at cross-purposes. This situation arises from the fact that they often seek to transplant the meanings associated with one tenure regime into another as if it was unproblematic to do so. This is more the case where Anglo-Saxon land tenure terminology, such as 'ownership', is translated in local languages or vice versa. Ownership of land in Western and in some African cultures could mean the legal entity in which the paramount title to land is vested simpliciter. For most communities of the Upper West Region (particularly the Dagara) where the word 'own' is translated as so, it becomes important to appreciate the context in which ownership is raised - over what the claimant actually asserts ownership. Is the claim of ownership over spiritual rights over land, user rights for farming only, ownership of economic trees only, owner as first-comer, etc.?
This paper seeks to explore first, the delineation of the range of landrights in the discourses of land relations within the Upper West communities as it differs between state law and local perceptions. Second, the paper will discuss the terminology as problematic and indicate how claimants in land disputes often speak at cross-purposes, because they seek to transplant the terminology of one tenure regime into another. Third, the paper will use two typical examples of land disputes in the Upper West Region (Lawra/Yagtuuri and Taalipuo/Namaala) as case studies to illustrate the multiple layers of landrights involved, the selective discourses at play, and the common misunderstanding of the adversaries in the disputes, as well as the official attempts at resolving them within local bureaucracies.
This paper is based on fieldwork undertaken by the author in the five district assembly areas of the Upper West Region between April 1998 and September 1999. The two land disputes used for illustration were among five such case studies conducted during the fieldwork. Part of the data collected during the fieldwork was incorporated into the author's doctoral thesis that was submitted to the School of Law of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom in 2000.
Current discourses on land and renewable natural resources management insist on decentralised local management as the solution to the problems raised by the contradiction between state law and local rules. In French-speaking Sahelian countries, recent legal reforms concerning pastures, forests, fishing, indeed moved toward 'local management'.
The perverse impacts of the state monopoly over resources and the following disorganisation of customary management are quite obvious. But the idea of 'local management' is not so clear. There are a lot of conceptual and practical ambiguities in the way different actors see this 'local management': what is at stake behind it is a new balance of power between State agents, customary authorities, new local leaders, elected bodies, etc.
Moreover, while the very extensive literature on common property resources (CPR's) shows that there are other alternatives for sustainable management other than open access and private property, and while this literature is really useful in describing local systems and analysing them, it continues to mainly focus on an economic community-based approach, which raises questions:
In this context, one may wonder whether shared rules can be negotiated and enforced, and if so, under which conditions. While raising good questions (the need of local management, the need of shared rules and institutions), the current discourses on local management fail to take into account the socio-political nature of the control over natural resource access and its current dynamics. Filed projects based on them have counterproductive effects. My paper will discuss these issues.
Central Benin constitutes the last agrarian frontier of the country, and a true ethnic mosaic. Successive waves of migration coming from densely populated regions (Atakora Mountains in the north-western part of the country, Aja plateau in the south-west, and the south-central- Abomey plateau) have deeply transformed the agricultural and political landscape over the last 40 years, especially in the last two decades. However, the history of mobility in the region is older. It can be traced back as far as in the interwar-period when mostly young men went in workers' teams to the Gold Coast and later to the Ivory Coast. Before that, central Benin had, from the seventeenth century on, been a buffer zone between the slave-raider states of Dahomey in the south, Oyo in the east, and the Wasangari chieftaincies of pre-colonial Borgu. Mobility and shifting identities, as well as political allegiances, were part and parcel of the context; and the Mahi ”ethnic group” can be seen as a by-product of this unsettled history. (the Mahi belong to the Gbe-speaking group like the Fon, the dominant ethnic group in Benin and, together with various Yoruba subgroups, are considered as the 'autochthons' in central Benin.) However, Mahi ethnogenesis has been long-term process (the earliest recordings of the name trace back to the 1730s; Law 1991) and remains an ongoing ”cultural work” (Peel 1989), spanning the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial periods. Furthermore, it is in no way a linear process, eventually resulting in 'the Mahi' as a clear-cut and homogenous group that would exactly coincide with the we-group. For instance, the French politics of alliance (with the kings of would-be Mahi and Dassa confederacies) in the early phase of colonisation and non-stabilised forms of indigenous administration and territorial divisions, engendered much confusion and debates about a 'real' Mahi identity, which last to this day (and renewed within decentralisation and multiparty politics). Arguments are at the same time anchored in conflicting interpretations over the role of Mahi clans and chieftaincies in the pre-colonial wars and alliances with, or against, the kingdom of Dahomey and the neighbouring Yoruba states.
Moreover, the feeling of belonging is made of various and situated identities, not limited to the ethnic one. The interplay of multiple belongings with land access and control is described and analysed in this contribution on the basis of field research (short-term missions) carried out in 1993, 1995, and 2002 in the commune of Gbanlin located a few kilometres west of Ouessè in north Zou (now the Département des Collines). Gbanlin was founded in the late nineteenth century by aggregating several clans (akò), each of them having a complex trajectory of escape and resettlement. The clan is thus of great importance, although practically conflating with the lineage (hènnu) that appears to be its localised expression (at the village level). Relations between lineages and within them (between segments or hwe) were originally thought of as functional rather than as hierarchical, notwithstanding the pre-eminence of the founding clan Devo. The clan/lineage is spontaneously referred to as a primary level of belonging (in this respect, there is no difference between the nature of ethnic, clan and lineage levels; Mercier 1968). This was forged through the pre-colonial history of lineage displacements and encounters (still partly reflected in the naming of lineages). However, a sense of locality progressively emerged at village and ward level (see also the importance of agricultural hamlets – doho – and camp or ”farm” – gleji – in local spatial representations). This occurred through the history of settlement, the territorial stabilisation brought about by the colonisation, and political and matrimonial alliances between lineages. This feeling of belonging was furthermore – and somewhat paradoxically – reinforced through migrations of workers' groups to the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast in the period from the 1930s to 1960s, the membership of which was based on criteria of kinship and neighbourhood (see also the role of social investments in the village thanks to the wealth acquired in migration). This contributed to a sense of 'Mahiness' especially with respect to other autochthon groups of the area (Yoruba subgroups such a the Sabè and the Idasa).
Different factors came to make the picture more complex from the 1970s and 1980s onwards. Migrants from other regions of Benin became part of local accumulation strategies through control over the labour force. The sequence of settlement used to begin with a labour relation before the migrant was granted a piece of land by the lineage head (hènnugan). As an expression of social relationships between autochthonous landholders and migrants, land issues progressively emerge as intrinsically political (see for instance the exclusion migrants from the local public arenas and their adoption of local Vodun cults). Institutional innovations occurred in the 1990s with the imposition of a land rent on migrants, with chieftaincy attempts to enter the land tenure arena, and with the start – and instrumentalization – of a natural resource management project. The main tensions do not actually rest in the opposition between autochthons and newcomers, but rather between elders and youngsters. This is firstly because of contrasting experiences of migration: for the former an economically and socially successful one in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, much more frustrating for the latter who were evicted from Nigeria in the 1980s. This line of cleavage was reinforced (and also complicated) with the intrusion of new Christian churches from the late 1980s onward, resulting in – and expressing - acute conflicts. Religious membership did not merely reproduce a local intergenerational opposition, it also had a strong economic content (between local big men who are big food crop traders) and tended to crosscut villages boundaries (through an opposition between new Protestant churches on the one hand, and a coalition of Catholic and Vodun groups on the other hand). The intricacy between various lines of opposition (generation, wealth, lineage, religion, autochthony) is reflected in a proposal negotiated in the 1990s for the partition of a village in three autonomous wards (actually three administrative villages) where none of these lines would clearly dominate. The splitting of the village is thus rather seen by local elites as a rational way to recover social and political control over a more limited community including migrants and young ”troublemakers”.
Recent studies on African land tenure emphasise that landrights are flexible, negotiable and embedded in power relations. They also underline the resilience of legal pluralism in rural property regimes and the adaptability of indigenous land tenure systems to new challenges, such as population pressure, labour migration and incentives for commercial agriculture. However, the customary tenure regimes themselves have received relatively little attention or have been reified. Many studies seem to share implicitly the romanticist, anti-modern view of pre-colonial land tenure that colonial officials developed, often in cooperation with African chiefs, and that anthropologists helped to refine. Their perspective on indigenous land tenure was guided by three axioms, namely that Africans associate land with deep religious meaning, that they own land communally (should the concept of 'property' be applicable at all), and that they believe land to be inalienable. In addition, colonial officers and anthropologists have tended to think of traditional land tenure in terms of a coherent, homogenous, and stable, if not static, system of rules and beliefs.
These orthodox assumptions on indigenous land tenure are not altogether wrong, but they do not enable us to understand the past dynamics of and conflicts over landownership. More specifically, they cannot explain how indigenous property regimes dealt with the mobility that is so typical for the history of West African agriculturalists. If, for instance, land is held to be principally unalienable, how have expansionist groups been able to gain access to and legitimise control over land previously held by other, more sedentary groups? I believe it is therefore necessary to extend the awareness of the ambiguity, negotiability, and political embeddedness of landrights applied to current tenure arrangements also to those of pre-colonial past.
Using the historical example of the expansion of Dagara agriculturalists, who immigrated into territory controlled by Sisala-speaking groups, in what is now southern Burkina Faso and north-western Ghana, I wish to explore indigenous theories of, and debates about, landownership. Although violence played an important role in the de facto appropriation of land, property rights needed (and still need) to be secured by 'persuasion', because, as the historian of law Carol Rose (1994) has succinctly argued, violence per se cannot legitimise property rights. Among the Sisala and Dagara, arguments about the legitimate initial establishment and the transmission of property rights are stated implicitly in the form of migration-and-settlement histories that elders narrate in order to explain local boundaries, justify the distribution of land, and advance claims to the office of earth priest. Two sets of arguments on property rights can be discerned from these stories. The first concerns ideas about legitimate initial land possession, the second ideas about legitimate modes of land transfer from one group to another. The Dagara and Sisala generally share the argument that 'first-comer' status confers special rights over land, but they disagree considerably about the precise definition of first-comership and the meaning of specific acts of transfer, such as the exchange of cowries and animals for an earth-shrine stone. The paper will use cases of current and past conflict over landownership to explore these competing interpretations and their political implications.
This paper deals on two levels with the history of landownership in Bolgatanga as a story of competing claims to customary authority and clashes between public and private interests in land. Firstly, it is a straightforward account of some of the significant administrative and legal rules and practices that have prevailed. Secondly, a number of different instances of negotiation of property and authority are presented. Property rights have changed radically and dramatically in Bolga and the Upper Regions over the past century, especially during the past two decades. Chiefs and earth priests have, on the one hand, competed for the control over the land, while the state, on the other hand, seized formal control over the land until 1979. When the state divested itself from the land in 1979, competition between the various stakeholders intensified, as the potential benefits were huge. However, each instance of renegotiation of property seems characterised by inconclusiveness. It would seem that as long as political circumstances, administrative procedures or economic opportunities are likely to change, new hands will be dealt, and few will be able to say who owns Bolgatanga with any significant degree of enduring certainty.
Allotments of building land in Bobo Dioulasso, economic capital of Burkina Faso have always been the source of some frustration at the level of the autochthons. But, as long as there has been space for agricultural activities to which these exclusively could devote themselves, frustrations have been mastered. Yet, the methods of administration, in the form of the rule of nativeness the imposed by the French at the end of the nineteenth century, have somehow obliged landowners to submit. Since the rise of Democracy in 1991 and the start of the process of Decentralisation in 1995, allotments in Bobo Dioulasso city have brought about another phenomenon: growing frustrations with the ideology of autochthony. Throughout our communication, we are going to devote ourselves to understanding:
The most recent generation of West African land laws is marked by a self-proclaimed recognition of so-called customary rights. This contribution analyses three different approaches:
Positive and negative effects (if any) are discussed.
This presentation discusses patterns of appropriating the 'natural' resources land and gold. Modern non-industrial gold mining in Burkina Faso began in the 1980s in response to a drought that affected several West African countries in the Sahel and Savanna regions. Many young men turned to gold digging as an alternative to farming, petty trading, or plantation labour in neighbouring coastal countries. Both by the local people in south-western Burkina Faso and the immigrating gold diggers land and gold are not merely seen as material objects but are conceived of as being endowed with supernatural properties. This has specific consequences for the way in which the local population and the gold diggers compete for the control of these resources. By comparing different cases of the appropriation of gold-bearing sites, three patterns emerge: laissez-faire, negotiation, or expulsion.