Mosaics of property: control of village land in West Africa

ABSTRACT

The control of rural land in West Africa deviates strongly from the common notions of private and common property. Most rural peoples are formally borrowers of the land they farm. Results of a detailed study of the property rights attached to all fields within three proximate village territories in the Fakara region of southwestern Niger are presented. This work reveals that property landscapes vary significantly across villages as shaped by the history of settlement and ongoing struggles to redefine property rights. In particular, the politics within village chieftaincies over the definition of common land managed by the chief in contrast to private land held by chieftaincy members has important implications for the use rights held by all villagers. Observations point to an ongoing process of privatization supported by local interpretations of customary law.

KEYWORDS:

• privatization
• chieftaincy
• social inequality
• Sahel
• land tenure

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Adamou Kalilou and Pierre Hiernaux for their contributions to the research. The research benefited from important logistical support from the International Livestock Research Institute.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Matthew Turner is a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His interests revolve around the political ecology of climate change vulnerability, land rights, agropastoral mobility and agrarian governance in Sudano-Sahelian West Africa. Corresponding author: [email protected]

Omar Moumouni is a researcher with Groupe de Recherche, d’Études et d’Action pour le Développement (GREAD), a nongovernmental organization that performs research and extension in the areas of resource management and agricultural development in Niger. Moumouni has over 20 years of experience working on questions of ecological and climate change, livestock husbandry, pastoralism, socioeconomic development and environmental governance in Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali.

Notes

1 Customary rights to land are generally gained through the clearing of land for crop agriculture. Rights to pastures through first grazing of an area are generally not recognized. Control of rights to pastures is generally gained through the control of water points or pastoral encampment points from which livestock graze. Since the colonial period, these rights have generally not been recognized by the state, with rights gained through agricultural clearing recognized over grazing rights (Turner 1999, 2006).

2 Within the study area, widows without sons of age within chieftaincy lineages may, under certain conditions, gain individual rights to the land of their deceased husbands. Moreover, widows of non-chieftaincy lineages without sons of age may borrow land and inherit the right to borrow the fields previously borrowed by their husbands.

3 The FulBe is an ethnic group whose identity is tied to livestock rearing; they are also referred to in the literature as Fulani, Peuls and Fula.

4 In some cases, members of the chieftaincy may borrow land from each other. Borrowers in such cases are likely to enjoy more rights.

5 While this is disputed by members of the chieftaincy, several Diabou informants report that the first village chief of Diabou was actually from the Bagaou slave clan. According to these accounts, a diviner stated that there would be a death in the family of the first chief due to a curse. As a result, Halidou had Bagaou take the post first and within a couple of months one of Bagaou’s wives died along with Halidou’s horse that had been loaned to them. The curse was completed and at this point Halidou took up the post of chief.

6 See the area cleared prior to well digging immediately to the southwest of the village in Figure 3.

7 Informants point to even more people with kinship ties involved in the well digging, but these either died or fled the area during the drought that ravaged the area in 1914. This loss of lineage lines due to the 1914 drought or to subsequent crises undoubtedly affected all of the village chieftaincies in the Fakara.

8 The right to sell reportedly is attached to all of these gifts except in the case of category 11 (Figure 3).

9 Without such an approach, these complexities are only revealed in land disputes over the rights to particular fields (Ngaido 1996). Such approaches, while invaluable, do not provide a sense of the broader complexity of property claims across agricultural landscapes.

10 It is important to emphasize that the private rights held by chieftaincy members over land within the study area diverge from concepts of pure private property since they must defend their need to sell this land to other members of the chieftaincy linage. This reflects the moral obligation of chieftaincy members to not erode the lineage’s land wealth, thus limiting the amount of land sold to outsiders.

11 One can argue that if land was to become more productive, there would be greater incentives for privatization. This is the conundrum of the rural poor in Niger: one can maintain access to borrowed land as long as it remains unproductive. In most cases, the material interests of more private landowners are better served by collecting crop share than seeking to farm land themselves. As the FulBe in the Fakara have found, improvements in the productive potential of fields (through manuring) often result in their land being taken back by owners (Heasley and Delehanty 1996). The customary system, however, is primed for widespread enclosure and fuller privatization if the land was to become more profitable, as has been found in the cotton zone of Burkina Faso (Gray and Dowd-Uribe 2013).

12 In fact, one could argue that the limited potential of the study area for commodity agriculture slows the rate at which these struggles lead to privatization (by reducing the incentives for privatization faced by chieftaincy members), making them more observable than in areas of higher potential.

13 One would expect alternating patterns of chieftaincy members’ and chieftaincy land moving out from the village center which is generally not observed in the study village territories. Instead, one observes blocks of land under these property categories (see Figures 2–4).

14 While non-chieftaincy members would generally support the maintenance of the chieftaincy commons against the private claims of chieftaincy members, this is a messy politics with diffuse and shifting interests and alliances. For example, it is not uncommon for clients to support the private claims of their patrons in the hopes they will benefit indirectly through greater access to borrowed land.

15 The slow march described here is most clear in the case of Bani where, under weak leadership, chieftaincy common lands were redesignated as private land held by chieftaincy members. While less dramatic in the other two village territories, we find that such redesignations also occur at particular historical moments. In Koukou, our discussions of certain plots of land suggest that, while they were initially viewed as chieftaincy land, they were redefined in the past as more private land held by chieftaincy members. Even in Diabou, the case of the Bossado is one of enclosure (category 4, Figure 2).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation of the United States [award #0648075].