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Abstract:
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Malawi, like other countries in Africa, has a new land policy designed to clarify and formalize customary tenure. In this research, the case raises issues relevant to land tenure reform elsewhere: the role of ‘traditional authorities’ or chiefs vis-à-vis the state and ‘community’; variability in types of ‘customary’ tenure; and deepening inequality within rural populations. Even before it is implemented, the pending land policy in Malawi is intensifying competition over land.
This document discusses this and the following:
(a) increase in rentals and sales;
(b) the effects of public debates about the new land policy;
(c) a new discourse about ‘original settlers’ and ‘strangers’;
(d) and political manoeuvring by chiefs.
The social conflict over land has been described as entangled with competition and conflict over authority:
(a) between elders or seniors and juniors,
(b) between traditional authorities or chiefs of various stripes and younger educated groups,
(c) between men and women,
(d) between locals and migrants,
(e) between autochthones and strangers, and
(f) between state and people
Research has also described various modes of ‘informal formalisation’: that is, ways of providing more formal recognition of transfers of land than the customary oral means. These transfers include not only the usual modes of transfer to heirs either after or before the death of a land-holder, but also the newer ones of rent and sale.
How to account for the appearance or increase in incidence of such transfers in systems still legally labelled as customary and usufructuary, and how to define such transfers, including whether or not they are market transactions.
Overall, the complexity of claims and transfers suggests that a strict division between state-led and community-led reform produces an unsupportable dichotomy. Yet while a ‘mixed’ approach seems called for, it faces considerable challenges, including
taking serious account of actual practices rather than idealised systems or law on the books, and asking whose security is gaining or losing rather that assuming that security inheres in a particular type of tenure, or a legal procedure, such as titling. |