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  • The Politics of Land Reform in Africa: From Communal Tenure to Free Markets
  • Sylvia Federici
Ambreena Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa: From Communal Tenure to Free Markets. London and New York: Zed Books, 2006. vii + 149 pp. Notes. Index. £50.00. Cloth. £16.99. Paper.

Ambreena Manji’s book is an insightful analysis of the logic and agencies governing land reform in Africa in the age of neoliberal globalization. Building on World Bank reports and the new laws African governments are adopting to change land relations, the book examines the shift from a redistributive statist model, dominant until the 1970s, to one stressing the formalization of tenurial property, with the introduction of titling and registration, as the thrust of land reform on the continent. A legal scholar, Manji is interested in understanding why the law has come to play a central role in the definition of land reform. She argues that this innovation is consistent with a neoliberal project wherein the law acts as an instrument for the globalization of capitalist relations and the transfer of power from the local to the global, in this case removing the control over land policy from the nation-state and local communities to international “donors” and financial institutions, beginning with the World Bank.

She also suggests that the formalization of land relations is an attempt to contain the struggles of rural people’s movements which, faced with land grabbing by states, private companies, and local chiefs, and with the state’s failure to address the historic injustices that are the legacy of colonialism, are demanding more secure access to land and opting for direct action through land occupations. In her view this pressure from below accounts for the populist language by which land reform is promoted, portraying it as a strategy for “poverty reduction.” Manji points to the influence on the World Bank’s land policy of Hernando De Soto’s theory, according to which Third World rural populations are mired in poverty and economic stagnation because of the continuing existence of communal land tenure regimes which make for uncertain property relations, dampening incentives for investment and rural innovation. Hence the promise that titling and the expansion of land markets will open a new era of development and prosperity for African peasants, if only they could learn that land as such is a “dead asset” that becomes alive only when “brought to the bank” as collateral for the acquisition of rural credit and the financing of rural business.

Manji disputes this preposterous claim, showing that there are good reasons why farmers may prefer informal tenure relations (e.g., to avoid taxation). She also appeals to the experience of the land reforms adopted in the 1990s in Uganda and Tanzania. This experience demonstrates that the formalization of land relations benefits international investors—who are assured their investments will be protected—while it frustrates the demands of rural people, leading to debt and land alienation. Manji’s analysis of the debates and conflicts that accompanied the imposition of these laws [End Page 149] and the legal machinery required by their implementation is one of the most effective parts of the book.

Most important, however, is her denunciation of the absence of feminist organizations in these debates, and the patriarchalist implications of the land policy proposed by the World Bank. This policy sees the success of peasant agriculture in the mobilization of family labor. But, as Manji points out, this is in reality a coded call for the use by male peasants of women’s unpaid labor, a strategy bound to curtail further women’s access to land, deepen gender-based inequality, and subject women to much coercion. The importance of this warning cannot be overemphasized. As the witch hunts that have occurred in African countries through the 1990s demonstrate, in a context of diminishing resources a gender war is already taking place in rural Africa, with women’s land use rights and claims often at its core.

In conclusion, Manji must be commended for alerting us to the fact that the proposed land reforms will undermine the livelihood of the African people, strengthen patriarchal relations, and intensify violence against women...

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