Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T23:30:59.147Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Baganda Land Tenure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 August 2012

L. P. Mair
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Baganda land tenure has always differed in important respects from most of the systems found in East Africa. Elsewhere the whole system rests on the principle that all land is the property of some kindred group whose controlling authorities administer it on behalf of that group, their supreme duty being to preserve it for the use of its members. Where powerful political authorities exist they usually exercise rights of disposal and readjustment which may conflict with the powers claimed by kinship heads, but these powers have never died out altogether.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 1933 , pp. 187 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1933

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

page 187 note 1 This paper is the result of nine months’ investigation on the spot from December 1931 to August 1932. For the theoretical approach to the subject I am indebted to Professor B. Malinowski. L.P.M.

page 193 note 1 Thus Roscoe's rather surprising statement that ‘Chiefs had to be on the alert to prevent people from burying their dead in good gardens, because the gardens thereby become freehold lands’, and that ‘if people were discovered burying their dead in a garden they were ordered to take the body away to the family-estate’ (The Baganda, p. 134), rests on a misconception.

page 196 note 1 In modern conditions the mutongole is the small holder who has bought his land. He is still formally installed by a representative of the royal authority, in the person of a messenger from the muruka (lowest-grade chief), to whom he gives a shilling or two and a ceremonial meal. In practice it would, of course, be rare for a man who could afford to invest in a plough not to be a mutongole.

page 198 note 1 The titles are not exclusive to this position, but are held by the subordinate authorities of any chief.

page 203 note 1 These figures were supplied me by Mr. H. B. Thomas, of the Land Office, Entebbe.