Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa (review)

Few things are more fundamental in social life or politics than what we have and who we are. Property and social identity, in the broadest sense, are perhaps the most overt and familiar manifestations of these core dimensions. Few issues in Africa connect the two aspects more intimately than land, where claims to land are defined partly by social identity, and social identity is defined partly through property. At the same time, few issues test and challenge this connection more acutely than the idea of a mortgage: the mortgage basically strips land of a complex of social relations. When mortgaged, land belongs to one single person (and not a group with variable, seasonal, generational, and other partly overlapping claims); it becomes fully alienable (and is thus no longer to be claimed by virtue of identity); and it is therefore a "simple" commodity. So while a mortgage can raise capital for the landowner at the risk of dispossession if he (indeed, mostly "he") cannot honor the debt in time, other (secondary) rights-holders had already been dispossessed long before—at the time the loan was taken out. In short, the mortgage represents the crucial rupture between belonging and possession. It is where "Things Fall Apart."

Parker Shipton's book examines how the principles of landholding among the Luo in Western Kenya, historically based on access through kinship and social ties, have been affected by land reform—specifically the famous Swynnerton Plan—which at its core promotes individualization and alienation. Named after the assistant director of agriculture Roger J. M. Swynnerton, this was the first comprehensive and nationwide plan for land titling in Africa. Launched in 1954 by the British-run Department of Agriculture, and continuing under Kenya's own postcolonial government since independence in 1963, the land registration program by the turn of the century had come to cover most of the higher-potential farmland in the country—and among these lands, most of the farmland in the Luo country.

The author argues that it is not titling itself that produces a problem for smallholders, nor does credit in and of itself undermine security. Rather, "the conjunction of individual land titling and farm credit in the freehold-mortgage process is what makes both parts together so hazardous, and personal, family, and community fortunes so volatile" (239). In a context of capricious rain-fed agriculture, farmers are likely to be caught, sooner or later, in a trap in which debts cannot be serviced in time and foreclosure is the result. If to this we add the unequal distribution of power characteristic of Kenya (as well as much of Africa) and stir in a context of rural economic insecurity for many, we end up with a violently efficient mechanism for increasing land concentration and increasing landlessness. Shipton points out that this was never seen as a problem by the architects of the Plan. Indeed, insofar as they thought about this at all, they found the prospect attractive: to Swynnerton, social differentiation was inherent to the "natural evolution of property." While social differentiation and landlessness had become political issues by the time of the debates on the Kenyan Constitution in 2003, the political power of landowners and their organizations had managed to neutralize most efforts at reforming the land legislation.

Luo society has not embraced the land reform wholeheartedly, however. Innumerable small obstructions to the reform—ranging from failure to register land transactions to harassment of buyers of foreclosed property—have undercut the reform just as effectively as any well-orchestrated collective action might have done. However, the perverse result is that while the mortgage system seems to have ground to a standstill, many families do face internal rivalries, dispossession, and uprooting. In particular, Shipton suggests, women and poor people in general (without political protection) will fall through the cracks. It would have been helpful if he could have been more specific about just how the dysfunctional mortgage system still produces pernicious...