Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa: Natives and Strangers

Notes

251 Notes Introduction 1. Peter Geschiere and Joseph Gugler, eds., “The Politics of Primary Patriotism,” special issue, Africa 68 (1998). 2. The earth priest is usually assumed to be a descendant of the first settlers who concluded a spiritual pact with the earth deities and thereby obtained permission to found a village and distribute the land—arrangements that I explain in more detail below. That place-names and names of the alleged founder of a settlement are often identical is a mnemonic device that is sometimes confusing for the uninitiated researcher (and reader), but typical of the area’s migration-and-settlement stories. 3. This is a verbatim, but condensed, excerpt from what was a much longer narrative in my interview with Tantuoyir, Soyeru Buolu, and others, 27 November 1989, Tantuo. 4. That property rights are held qua membership in a group even holds true for individual private ownership and other rights granted by state land legislation, because an individual holds these rights only as a citizen of a specific nation-state. On the connections between property rights and citizenship, see chapter 4 in this book and Christian Lund, “Landrights and Citizenship in Africa,” Discussion Paper 65 (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2011). 5. Carol M. Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), 297. 6. For an insightful discussion of the importance of the first-comer/late-comer configuration on the African frontier, see Igor Kopytoff, “The Internal African Frontier: The Making of African Political Culture,” in The African Frontier: The Reproduction of Traditional African Societies, ed. Kopytoff, 3−84 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). However, Kopytoff does not discuss the frontier process in terms of the establishment of property rights. 7. Arjun Appadurai, “The Past as a Scarce Resource,” Man 16 (1981): 201−19. 8. For a history of ethnicity and political conflict in the Ghanaian part of the Black Volta region, see Carola Lentz, Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 9. “We are managing” is an expression that farmers from Ghana’s Upper West Region often use to describe their efforts to make ends meet in the face of difficult circumstances; it has provided the title of Kees van der Geest’s insightful study of rural livelihood strategies in Northwestern Ghana, “We’re Managing!”: Climate Change and Livelihood Vulnerability in Northwest Ghana, Research Report 74 (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2004). 10. The figure is culled from CEDEAO-CSAO/OCDE, L’atlas web de l’intégration régionale en Afrique de l’Ouest, 2006, www.atlas-ouestafrique.org/spip.php?article168. 11. This figure is taken from Camilla Toulmin, “Negotiating Access to Land in West Africa: Who Is Losing Out?” in Conflicts over Land and Water in Africa, ed. Bill Derman, Rie Odgaard, and Espen Sjaastad (Oxford: James Currey, 2007), 96. According to Kasim Kasanga and N. A. Kotey (Land Management in Ghana: Building on Tradition and Modernity [London: IIED, 2001]), 80 percent of all land in Ghana is held under “customary arrangements.” 12. For a comprehensive discussion of this concept and related recent research, see Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, “The Dynamics of Change and Continuity in Plural Legal Orders,” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 53/54 (2006): 1−44. 252 | Notes to Pages 7–9 13. Sara Berry, “Debating the Land Question in Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 648. 14. See, for instance, Gershon Feder and R. Noronha, “Land Rights Systems and Agricultural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa,” World Bank Research Observer 2 (1987): 143−89; and Gershon Feder and David Feeny, “Land Tenure and Property Rights: Theory and Implications for Development Policy,” World Bank Economic Review 5 (1991): 135−53. For a critical discussion of the “freehold-mortgage doctrine” and the Kenyan land titling program, see Parker Shipton, Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 15. Jean-Philippe Platteau, “The Evolutionary Theory of Land Rights as Applied to Sub-Saharan Africa: A Critical Assessment,” Development and Change 27 (1996): 29–86. 16. On these policy-related debates, see, for instance, Richard Barrows and Michael Roth, “Land Tenure and Investment in African Agriculture: Theory and Evidence,” Journal of Modern African Studies 28 (1990): 265−97; John W. Bruce, “Do Indigenous Tenure Systems Constrain Agricultural Development?” in Land in African Agrarian Systems, ed. Thomas J. Bassett and Donald E. Crummey (Madison: University of Wisconsin...