Mortgaging the Ancestors: ideologies of attachment in Africa (review)

There is a growing body of historical and anthropological literature on the subject of land and the politics of belonging in Africa. Parker Shipton's remarkable ethnographic study of the Luo people in Kenya provides an important addition and offers an interesting contribution to the debates on the interplay between land and the politics of belonging in Africa. This is the second volume in Shipton's trilogy on the Luo, of which the first is The Nature of Entrustment. The main focus of this particular volume is land, credit, indebtedness and belonging in Africa. The book provides an intriguing story of African peoples' attachment to land and the threats of dispossession brought about by the introduction of freehold tenure and mortgaging.

The author uses the case of the Luo in Kenya to show that ideologies about land and attachment have often clashed with government policies aimed at titling land and making it possible to use it as collateral in applying for agricultural loans. It is this Western model of land tenure and credit which Shipton sees as threatening the Luo people's attachment to their ancestral lands and the future of their belonging.

The author commences by furnishing valuable historical background on the development of the mortgage system in Europe and North America. He devotes the first chapter of the book to analysing the freehold-mortgage nexus and explaining why it was exported to Kenya during British colonial rule in the 1950s. This system was forcibly imposed on Kenya because the colonial administration perceived it to be the best way of improving agricultural productivity. The main assumption was that freehold tenure would benefit farmers by allowing them to use their land as collateral when applying for loans from financial institutions. Shipton effectively illustrates the adverse effects of freehold tenure and the mortgaging of land in Kenya through the use of ethnographic data.

Particularly important in this book is the debate on the applicability of the concept of freehold tenure in Africa and whether land can be bought or pledged as collateral for a loan and consequently forfeited if the debtor defaults. Shipton concludes, quite rightly, that the freehold-mortgage system of credit does not suit the Kenyan people and arguably many other rural African communities whose tenure is communal. As he puts it, the mortgage 'threatens to separate people in rural areas from home, from kith and kin, and from ancestral graves, with all that these mean' (p. ix).

The author demonstrates that the nature of Africans' attachment to land renders it quite impossible to mortgage. Land and the graves and other cultural features on it are often viewed as inalienable heritage that cannot be sold. As the author argues, 'graves are the symbolic focal points of human attachments to place: the living and dead, the social and the material, all connect here' (p. 20). Chapter 4 is particularly interesting in that it emphasizes Luo attachment to land or what Shipton calls 'earthly anchorage' and the place of ancestral graves in sealing the bond between people and their land. He argues that, for the Luo, and indeed many other African societies, graves and abandoned old homes ('gundni bur') are important features in determining who belongs where. This is the basis of the book's thesis that 'mortgaging the land is mortgaging the ancestors' (p. 176), since defaulting would often result in forfeiture of the land together with the ancestral graves.

The book also analyses the gender and intergenerational tensions brought about by the introduction of freehold tenure. The author demonstrates the plight of women in the context of freehold tenure and land mortgaging, as women are often excluded from holding title to land and suffer most when their husbands mortgage land without their knowledge. The author concludes by making a blow-by-blow critique of the freehold-mortgage doctrine based on the Luo experience and convincingly proves that the theoretical assumptions of this doctrine cannot work...