-
6. Land, Clients, and Tribal Bureaucrats
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
6 Land, Clients, and Tribal Bureaucrats the postcolonial minefield, “betwixt and between” The public administration of tribal land has been the great minefield for tribal citizenship in Botswana. The watchwords for the government have been pragmatic and gradual reform, backed by consent, when it has been a matter of changing tribal land tenure, and thus effecting the postcolonial reintegration of the tribe itself. Policies have often been justified on grounds of avoiding the risk of greater rural insecurity, dispossession of the poor, and landlessness on a large scale.1 Yet acute conflicts have arisen and not been easily settled through negotiation by consent owing to a multitude of opposed and intractable interests, from planned zoning and the hierarchical regulation of land use, to individual entrepreneurship and the extension of formal or informal markets in land, to government-controlled local development and centralization, and, perhaps most strikingly in this democracy, to due process and reasonable redress of disputes. Repeatedly the local state and the national state have either been at odds over tribal land issues, perhaps most dramatically over the peri-urban tribal land near Gaborone, or, in response to new modes of tenure and imposed regulation, they have both met popular opposition, often motivated by fierce local resentment. Throughout the country, however, no state agencies have been more con109 troversial and less loved than the Land Boards. There are now twelve Land Boards and thirty-eight Subordinate Land Boards. Originally their jurisdiction was over the “tribal areas,” corresponding to the nine tribal reserves of the colonial era. They were established for the administration of tribal land, soon after Independence, and modeled on Kenyan-cum-British prototypes. According to Clement Ng’ong’ola, a distinguished academic lawyer at the University of Botswana, “The problems which stand out as most intractable concern the efficiency of the boards, and the prevention of the recurrence of ‘lawlessness’ in tribal land dealings” (Ng’ong’ola 1993, 166).2 The government introduced the Land Boards largely because of a dominant and widely shared view that the nation has a postcolonial interest in tribal land. Leading politicians, senior civil servants, and prominent entrepreneurs wanted the public control and administration of land to be reorganized as an essential part of political development from the many tribes of the colonial Protectorate to the one democratic nation under an elected government. According to this dominant view, the so-called customary rights of individual tribesmen were not problematic; indeed, these rights had to be safeguarded. But there had to be an end to certain powers of paramount tribal rulers or, as denounced by the ruling party’s 1969 election manifesto, “the arbitrary decisions of the Chiefs” (Masire 1969, 14).3 The need was for a different kind of administrative agency, which new Tribal Land Boards, introduced in 1968 under the Tribal Land Act, were intended to be. The 1969 manifesto spelled out the dominant view further, while arguing that there was “no intention of excluding traditional authority” since chiefs would take part in the new Tribal Land Boards along with “the people’s elected representatives”: Reactionary and opportunist elements have falsely claimed that this legislation [the Tribal Land Act] is intended to force the small man off his land. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary all tribesmen who make good use of their land for the purpose for which it was granted to them will be safer under this new legislation than they were under the old. They will no longer be subjected to the whims of a chief whose decisions on land matters may be affected by all kinds of considerations which have nothing to do with the interests of the farmer or the nation. (Masire 1969, 14) The ruling party was pledged “to formulate progressive and enlightened policies of land utilisation” (Masire 1969, 15), and it is important to appreciate the stress on reformist aims, because these took priority in the recognition of citizens’ rights, at least by the Board where Kalanga are most numerous , the Tati Land Board in the North East District: Not only will the Tribal Land Act put people’s rights to their land on a proper democratic basis, but progressive farmers will be greatly assisted in their efforts to increase productivity. Furthermore . . . the farmers’ brigades citizens negotiating power 110 [44.200.49.193] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:53 GMT) [cooperatives of young farmers] will be . . . unhindered by outmoded restrictions . (Masire, 1969, 14) Land Boards have been typically “betwixt...