Space and Spirit on the Kenya-Tanzania Crossover
Posted: 26 Mar 2014 Last revised: 5 Jan 2015
Date Written: 2014
Abstract
African land tenure reaches beyond the confines of conventional western legal and political-economic terms such as rights and duties, public or private property, or collective or individual ownership. A wider array of concepts, taking real access, attachment, and mobility into account, is needed to capture the new practices and institutions for recording land use patterns that arise locally or are produced by diverse directed tenure reforms. The paper compares the ethno-linguistic communities of Kuria and Luo on both sides of Kenya-Tanzania border to illustrate their customary modes of land attachment and management, and to track transformations over the past century as questions of sequencing, hierarchy, and sovereignty have been contested. It explores how in these settings of resettlement and forced mobility, land property claims have become central in continuing struggles over belonging and identity. The paper compares two modes of how humans relate to land, with the lineage-oriented land attachment principle in Luo case, and the system of formal age-organizations of the Kuria. Focusing on the effects of liberalizing state reforms, the paper discusses how new forms of decollectivization and land concentration in East Africa produce novel patterns of exclusion and debates over territory and jurisdiction.
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