13 - The Sale of Farmland

Summary

‘Most theories of the allocation of land take … the ownership of land as given … We shall follow suit.’

Bliss and Stern (1982:53)

Although it is well over a century since the Krobo of the southern Gold Coast started buying forest land on a large scale for the purpose of establishing oil-palm plantations, the widespread belief that West Africans ‘never sell land’ dies so hard, despite so much evidence to the contrary, that it is necessary to include a brief discussion of the subject. This, also, provides a welcome opportunity of showing how farmland is now being priced out of the market in some densely populated rural localities.

I do not propose to devote much space to citing examples of the survival of misbeliefs about land-selling, although they are generally reflected in modern development theory, as the above epigraph shows. But it is necessary to point out that these misbeliefs are often an aspect of the sentimentalization syndrome – the idea that things are, touchingly, much the same as they have always been. Thus, Harrison in his popular textbook reflects that – ‘An [African] man can own the fruit of the earth – crops and trees which he himself planted and tended. But he cannot dispose of his plot or sell it, there is no individual title to land, no market in real estate.’