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Abstract
In Buganda, the monetary value of land and other values associated with land are intricately woven together. We shed light on entwined values of land from family and clan to kingdom and national levels by looking at the case of a historical site located in the periphery of Kampala. We document the general trend of land fragmentation, and the growth of an urban land market. Then we turn to land inheritance, individual effort to claim land and the ideology of protection of clan land, all of which contribute to redefine family and women’s rights. Finally, we deal with land as heritage. We argue against the idea of commoditization as a linear process, showing how value relates to interlocking scales of power. Strategies to consolidate clan land and privatization are occurring simultaneously. Those who believe in exclusive property construe the value of land in absolute terms, just as those who view land as heritage do. In contrast, we explore the relative value of land, analysing territory at different scales and looking at contradictory efforts to define and control land rights and uses, pondering over the hegemony of the Museveni regime.
Au Buganda, la valeur monétaire et les autres valeurs associées à la terre sont inextricablement liées. Nous éclairons ces valeurs enchevêtrées considérant terres familiales et claniques, ainsi que royaume et niveau national, à partir du cas d’un site historique situé en périphérie de Kampala. Nous documentons la tendance générale à la fragmentation des terres, et la croissance d’un marché foncier urbain. L’héritage foncier, l’effort individuel pour obtenir de la terre et l’idéologie qui vise à la protection du territoire clanique, que nous étudions successivement, contribuent tous à redéfinir les droits familiaux et des femmes. Pour finir, nous nous attachons au foncier comme patrimoine. Nous contestons l’idée que la marchandisation est un processus linéaire, et montrons comment la valeur est liée à des échelles d’emboîtement de pouvoir. Les stratégies pour consolider les terres claniques et la privatisation ont lieu simultanément. Ceux qui croient en la propriété exclusive interprètent la valeur foncière en des termes absolus, tout comme le font ceux qui considèrent les terres comme un héritage. A l’inverse, nous explorons la valeur relative de la terre, en l'analysant à différentes échelles, en regardant les efforts contradictoires pour définir et contrôler les droits et l’utilisation des terres, et en nous interrogeant sur l’hégémonie du régime Museveni.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful for the very valuable comments from colleagues who have reviewed previous versions of this article: the anonymous reviewers as well as Catherine Boone, Adrian Browne, Cherry Leonardi, Ambreena Manji and Henri Médard. They would also like to thank and appreciate the support of their friend and partner in this research Robinson Kisaka.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The Buganda Kingdom covers broadly a fourth of the territory of Uganda. ‘Ganda’, the root of the word, is combined with the prefix ‘bu’ to mean the place and ‘lu’ to mean the language and ‘ba’ to mean the people. Today the King has no executive power, but the kingdom regained state recognition as a cultural institution in 1993 after its abolition in 1967.
2 As for instance Betty Nambooze at the funeral of one of Buganda’s major title holders (Personal recording, Betty Namboooze, May Citation2011).
3 At the beginning of our study (2010), we managed to access various documents available at the Mukono District Land Board (Land Register, Blocks 87–93; Land Maps, Blocks 87–93). These documents covered the twentieth-century mailo changes and were still in use at that time. Since then, they were partly digitized and their archiving was reorganized. We also used the Entebbe Land Survey Archives (Maps 71/1/4-10, no date) for early twentieth-century references.
4 It was equated to freehold (McAuslan Citation2013).
5 The issue of the king’s official land, large estates on which people are settled, managed by the Kabaka Land Board is altogether different.
6 Personal recording, Betty Nambooze, one of Buganda's major title holders Funeral speech, 14 May Citation2011.
7 The constitution (1995) acknowledges four types of land tenure: mailo, leasehold, freehold and customary. In the Central region, which includes Buganda, all non-public land is mailo land.
8 To date, land titles and other documentary evidence for the property are considered as very valuable and are usually kept in safe places, often away from the land in question. In some cases, bibanja rights are less formalized, especially when no legal payments (busuulu) are made to title-holders.
9 The precise wording of the law refers to mailo but not to bibanja. The category bona fide occupants includes a wider range of recognized land users.
10 Mukono District Land Board, Land Register, Blocks 87–93; Mukono District Land Board, Land Maps, Blocks 87–93.
11 By placing a caveat on land, interested parties block any legal transaction on land until parties reach an agreement.
12 As financial tools, land titles might be considered as a security for banks (Manji Citation2003, Citation2006).
13 The entry fee is not set by law and it has increased (Unrecorded interview, Mu, April Citation2017).
14 In our area of study the going rate is 10% of the amount of the plot for officials.
15 Mukono District Land Board, Land Register, block 87.
16 Mukono District Land Board, Land Register, block 93. Delays in registration were common, not only because of the length of the procedure, but also because there used to be no specific need of changing the name on the title as long as there was no intention to sell it or split it.
17 Letter from Apolo Kawga to Daudi Chwa, Mengo, 30 March Citation1922, Bataka land Commission CO 536/133 p.572, National Archives, Kew.