Individualisation and the assault on customary tenure in Africa: title registration programmes and the case of Somalia

Abstract

Over the past forty years, programmes intended to individualise rights to land have been introduced across Africa. These programmes are supported by an ideology which argues that individualisation is a necessary prerequisite of agricultural investment and development. Utilising data collected on the effects of the national title registration programme in Somalia, and drawing on similar studies of registration programmes in other African countries, this article challenges the assumption that individualisation and registration necessarily result in improved agricultural investment and productivity. On the contrary, the data reviewed here suggest that such programmes have contributed to concentration of ownership, growing landlessness, insecurity of tenure, wealth inequalities, and even declining productivity in many areas. The motivation behind individualisation and registration programmes is analysed, including an examination of the colonial and Western ideological distinction between African ‘communal’ land tenure and modern Western individualised tenure, struggles for power over control of resources, and a tendency to treat land tenure as solely an economic (rather than social) institution.

Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa

“…The studies showed not only that such programmes failed to achieve the expected results of improving agricultural investment and productivity, but they also encouraged speculation in land by outsiders, thus displacing the very people -the local users of the land -who were supposed to acquire increased security through titling, and they facilitated practices of bribing, fraudulent titling and expropriation of land. As a result, the programmes frequently exacerbated conflicts and patterns of unequal access to land based on gender, age, ethnicity and class (Okoth-Ogendo 1976;Coldham 1978;Pala 1980;Davison 1988;Shipton 1988;Haugerud 1989;Attwood 1990;Shipton and Goheen 1992, 316;Shipton 1994, 364-5;Besteman 1994Besteman , 1996. A similar literature has revealed the negative to disastrous effects of land titling and privatization in livestock and range management schemes in Africa (Galaty et al 1981;Horowitz 1986;Baxter and Hogg 1990;Behnke et al 1993;Peters 1994).…”

Smoke, Curtains and Mirrors: The Production of Race Through Time and Title Registration

“…In the crisis that followed, it was overwhelmingly black and hispanic mortgagors who found they no longer belonged in their homes: their time as homeowners, in fulfilment of that 'American dream' cut short as they were rendered back to their status as temporary renters, trespassers or homeless. In the Global South, states that have adopted Torrens-like systems at the behest of the World Bank or the IMF have had large areas of land purchased by foreign investors, taking away local farmers' security and making more precarious the poorest residents whose relationship with land is informal and unregisterable (Besteman 1994). And here in England and Wales we have recently witnessed the criminalisation of squatting, a move which would not have made sense outside a registration system and which has a disproportionate effect on those who are already materially precarious and socially ostracised.…”

Land Tenure Frontiers and Food Security among Maasai Pastoralists in Kenya

“…The frontier of private and individual tenure rights is increasingly creeping into the formerly held communal and public arid and semi-arid lands of Africa (Dufour, 1971;Rutten, 1992;Besteman, 1994;Hesseling, 1994). Kenya's Kajiado District, home of Maasai pastoralists, is illustrative of this process.…”