Dr Amir Idris
Contemporary Africa
30 April 2002
Cornerstones of life
The search for equitable and appropriate land policies in modern Southern Africa
In Southern Africa, land sustains life. Customary patterns of land usage are tightly woven into the social fabric of agrarian cultures. Social policies must be shaped by a sympathy for the nature of customary land usage. Meaningful social policy must mesh with the multiple contexts of the past and the present. Social engineering cannot be based on point-in-time observations – society is informed by the foundations of the past more fundamentally than by the currents and eddies of the present`. Ignoring social context (the historical contextual foundation) risks the creation of irrelevant, destabilizing anachronisms.
Using an synthetic analysis of the combined historical, social and geographical context of the region, we will examine the suitability of the land policies in three characteristically representative nations – Botswana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, with comparative references to the current situations in Zambia and
South Africa1.
Southern Africa is geographically diverse. There are delicate ecosystems found nowhere else in the world. There are cultural groups that have been living in deserts, isolated and unchanged for centuries -- nomads eking out an existence from virtually nothing. There are enigmatic monoliths built by societies long since vanished and long, deserted seashores studded with diamonds. The subcontinent has been settled for a long time, and the frequent discoveries of human fossil remains confirm this.
Pastoralists and herders have long coexisted here, and conflicts have been localized and of low intensity. Primitive weaponry, undeveloped civilizations and vulnerability to nature’s whims have kept humans in a roughly even balance with nature. Starvation, drought and disease are frequent occurrences, and accepted as part of life by people who live closely bound to the land as a source of livelihood. Internecine warfare has long been a intrinsic feature of life here, too. Although whole tribal lineages have occasionally been extinguished or enslaved, subsumed by other more populous or more powerful groups, the magnitude of these periodic events has always been small.
Central to life here is the need for land and water. Much of Southern Africa is savannah, desert or semi-desert. The coastal margins provide fertile lands, but only a small fraction of the overall subcontinent south of the Democratic Republic of Congo is humid. For approximately sixty percent of the subcontinent, the climate is predominantly arid or semiarid (De Blij and Muller, 14-15).
The bond between people and the precious land on which they live has grown more complex over ten of generations of occupation. Presenting at the 1982 Land Conference held in Botswana, H.W. West from Wolfson College discussed a “simplified model of the traditional tenure systems though to have predominated in Africa south of the Sahara during pre-colonial times”. West’s summary description of traditional tenure systems is especially illuminating:
The community was utterly dependent upon land, but land use was only incidental to this relationship. As these societies became more firmly established, the heads of lineages or descent groups were recognized as holding administrative powers over land. These included powers of allocation, revocation, and reallocation amongst their lineage members, and the latter received users2, rights for purposes of habitation, cultivation, or grazing only.
[…] Some groups went further and attached a religious significance to land as the earth-goddess and it is from these traditional "cognatic" (i.e. relating to "cognates" or persons claiming descent from the same ancestor) interests that there arose the concept of land as a sacred family trust. The essentials of this concept are the identification of the land with the family through corporate ownership, the continuity through time of both the family and its land holdings, [emphasis added] and the limitations of the powers of the present land user by the rights of both the dead and the unborn.
[…] Clans were seen as belonging to the land, rather than the land belonging to the clans. To be deprived of land was an emotional shock, a psychological trauma, rather than merely an economic loss.
Understanding the importance of the bond to the land for these people, it is clear that the scheme of land management or allocation adopted by African countries is likely to have a long lasting and fundamental impact on the lives of the people. A counterpoint to West’s synthesis is that of Nadia Forni’s more technical discussion3 on the theoretical debate relating to the origins and implications of the notion of “common property regimes”. Forni proposes a structured approach to common property regimes (CPRs), recognizing that various types of common property exist, citing Moorhead’s (1991) working list of major categories, which include global international commons (e.g. fisheries), state common property (e.g. rivers, national parks) and common property resources (e.g. grazing lands).
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| 1. |
The “tragedy of the commons” |
| 2. |
Zimbabwe’s Farms For Friends |
| 3. |
Botswana’s Sweetened Chalice |
| 4. |
Turning An Honest Profit In Zambia |
| 5. |
A Beacon On The Eastern Coast |
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Works Cited
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Footnotes:
- Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Zambia (amongst others) are commonly referred to as “Anglophone” nations, in that they have a strongly English social and linguistic colonial inheritance. Mozambique and Angola are similarly referred to as “Lusophone”, alluding to their Portuguese colonial history.
- West also discusses the position with respect to “strangers” , who were allowed use-rights “… conditional upon the payment of periodic dues …”.
- Forni’s paper, from a FAO web site collection of materials relating to Agrarian Reform (Reforme Agraire) “is based on materials collected by [her] for a Ph.D. thesis (1998, unpublished)” (FAO web site)
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