Individual and Communal Forms of Land Tenure on Echo Island, 1820-1901

Individual and Communal Forms ofLand Tenure on Echo Island, 1820-1901 Jay Spaulding Kean College The present study is one of a series devoted to the historical reconstruction of a small rural community in the 19th-century colonial northern Sudan, a settlement located near the middle of the Shaiqiyya country on an island adjoining the west bank of the Nile; known until midcentury by the Nubian name Abranarti, the site was then Arabicized as the modern Jazirat Abu Ranat or "Echo Island."1 The reconstruction rests largely upon an archive of private legal documents and other records prepared or preserved for the Echo Island community by a locally prominent family of Islamic holy men, the Nidayfab.2 Among other concerns , these records document the transfer from one individual to another of many small plots of farmland on or near the island, sometimes through acts of sale, mortgage foreclosure, inheritance, judicial settlement or pious endowment, but far more commonly, as bridewealth. Most land in the Shaiqiyya country was cultivable only when irrigated , and the basic landholding unit was termed a saqiyya, after the oxdriven riverbank waterwheel that rendered it fertile. The saqiyya was a large landholding in the sense that although a single individual might own it, the labor of many hands was required to render it productive. Prevailing conventions of legal description from 19th-century Echo Island reveal the presence of two alternative systems by which this could be arranged. Under a colonial adaptation of the traditional system of rawka tenure inherited from precolonial times, a saqiyya was held communally by those who worked it, each of whom, according to a con-® Northeast African Studies (ISSN 0740-9133) Vol. 2, No. 2 (New Series) 1995, pp. 115-138 115 116 fay Spaulding tract at customary law (tiddan), had a right to a share of its fruits; an individual owner of the colonial age would claim the portion formerly appropriated by the erstwhile universal landowner, the Funj government . In other cases, however, a saqiyya holding was maqsuma, or quite literally divided up into separate, individually owned plots.3 In the documents from Echo Island, the presence of the rawka system may be inferred whenever a holding is defined as a proportional share of a saqiyya holding, and that of the maqsuma system when a holding is defined in terms of linear measure.4 The present study tests the hypothesis that over the course of the 19th century, in a colonial age of increasingly pervasive commoditization in many spheres of life, individual tenure should gain ground at the expense of communal tenure.5 Data Preparation The legal documents from Echo Island are not primarily concerned with changing forms of land tenure. They do speak meaningfully to this issue, but indirectly; the numerous small, discrete bits of evidence they afford must be extracted from the contexts in which they lie embedded and then arrayed along the historian's principal axes of space and time. Since a full display of the primary evidence would lie beyond the scope of any article, a clear account of the steps taken to prepare the data for analysis must be given in order to allow critical evaluation of the inferences to be derived therefrom. The documents of the Echo Island archive contain pertinent information about 228 individual landholdings; most (216) were the object of transfers, while the others were mentioned because they bounded on transferred property. Each landholding has been classified as rawka or maqsuma on the basis of the terminology used to describe it. The larger saqiyya unit to which each landholding belonged was identified, and a distinction was drawn between those saqiyyas located on Echo Island and those situated elsewhere. A record was kept of those cases in which a landholding transfer was also said to include rights to irrigation water or tree crops. Where landholding rights changed hands the form of transfer was recorded and the "dominant transactor" identified. The "dominant transactor" was defined as the groom who paid bridewealth, the father of the bride who provided a marriage settlement ßalal),6 or Individual and Communal Forms ofLand Tenure on Echo Island 117 the individual who purchased, bequeathed, or received landholding rights byjudicial settlement, pious...