LAND TENURE REFORM AND THE BALANCE OF POWER IN EASTERN AND SOUTHERN AFRICA
Liz Alden Wily
This is an extremely abstract paper on a burning issue. One suspects the influence of fund givers.
Under the guise of discussing the balance between the individual and the state it discusses what is in reality a move to bourgeois concepts of land-ownership. The issue seems to be whether traditional common land can be turned into collective ownership of land recognised in bourgeois courts.
The following abstract by the same author is a little clearer.
Chris Burford
London
The conclusion drawn is that, intentionally or otherwise, rural commons in
the region are gaining a great deal more recognition than was anticipated
during the 20 th century and will become a prominent property construct
during the new millennium. The gain derives mainly from resigned
recognition of the persistence of customary rights in land, despite decades
of largely conversionary tenure processes aimed to extinguish customary
regimes, and the need to now provide for these rights in national law. In
the process, there is growing recognition of the utility of certain customary
norms in tenure, not least being the capacity to hold property in common.
For the fact remains that a good number of estates in land � and forests,
wildlife and pastoral range prime among them - remain as unsuited to
subdivision and individualisation in the 21 st century as they were in the 20 th
century. Nor has appropriation of these properties by the state has not
proved as successful as anticipated and development strategies look
increasingly to the local level for reprieve.
Through these factors, notions of tenure are themselves undergoing
transition at the turn of the century. A central development is the
emergence of a new statutory tenure forms which permits groups of people
to hold property in common in registrable ways and in ways which new
laws are beginning to suggest as equivalent to entitlement of individually-owned
estates. This development is the focus of this paper. The paper
closes with a reflection of these changes in one prominent sphere of
common property in the region; forests and woodlands. New forest law, it
is shown, is beginning to provide for community-based tenure of these
resources. This realised in a highly tangible way the quite dramatic change
in fortunes of a long-existing practice in the continent, the right to hold
estates in common.
