The contemporary construction of the past is crucial for the successful vindication of political rights in Africa. Often, however, more than a single past proves potentially valid as a claim to land and office. When arguments of the past, furthermore, intertwine with competing projections of legitimate forms of land control, complex combinations of claims emerge. The ubiquity of ‘the past’ in African politics and the increasing competition over space suggest that the naturalness with which some refer to the past and others conceive of space should be under constant scrutiny. Based on work in northern Ghana, the article argues that the contemporary construction of the past, as either tradition or history, and the competing projections of land control, as either property or political territory, interdigitate in complex ways. This affords certain rhetorical or discursive combinations that competing social elite groups instrumentalize. Each group sees its interests best served by a particular reading of the past and a particular conception of space.

Using a case study of a rural town in the Ashanti Region, this article explores transformations in enterprise, property relations and informal governance that have occurred since Ghana embarked on a period of neo-liberal economic and political restructuring in the mid-1980s. Rather than a linear move away from state-controlled markets and authoritarian rule toward privatization and democratic decentralization, Ghana has witnessed a proliferation of authorities and economic enterprises, both formal and informal, that defy clear-cut distinctions between public and private property and institutions. In the town described here, as in many other localities in Ghana, chiefs have figured prominently as both instigators and examples of transformations in economic and governing practices and institutions.

Debates over land tenure have been instrumental to state-building in South Sudan since the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). Focusing on the local dynamics of post-conflict reconstruction in the town of Juba, this article argues that amidst the political and institutional change inaugurated by the transition from war to peace, debates over land provided a basis for the negotiation of the South Sudanese state. Actors at a variety of levels employed competing interpretations of rights to land as state-building strategies – as tools towards promoting particular visions of the state and of citizenship.

This article examines, through different processes of changing land use and land tenure, the various types of formal and informal contractual relations existing in two areas of the Niger Basin in southern Mali that are dominated economically by two parastatal companies: Compagnie Malienne pour le Développement du Textile (CMDT) and Office du Niger (ON). The article shows how the production interventions of these two companies shape the framework of land administration in the Niger Basin and the context in which customary relations operate, and lead to the commodification of land relations. It traces the various routes, contracts and arrangements through which people gain access to agricultural land. Besides describing the various transactions in land and contractual relationships, the article also analyses land leasing, sharecropping and various other ways of gaining secondary rights through prestations and loans. Finally, it describes the various land conflicts, the actors involved in making various claims on land and claims to land administration, and the institutions and institutional pluralism that emerge in conflict resolution. The article links these to the increasing commodification of land and agriculture, and the domination of policy by economic liberalism.

This article explores the ways in which the Ivoirian Land Code of 1998 has played into political debates around national citizenship that have divided Ivoirian society since the 1990s. The attempts to reinterpret public policies on land and immigration have played a crucial role in exacerbating the political crisis of nationalism. When land was linked to nationality and indigeneity, the land question became significant in determining the boundaries of nationality, since to gain security in property rights Ivoirian nationality had to be proved. The article traces how land policy has been transformed from an inclusive framework that encouraged the rapid expansion of the cocoa and coffee frontiers in the 1970s to an exclusionary policy rooted in concepts of nationalism and autochthony, as land became increasingly scarce in the south-west. The Land Code of 1998 endorsed this nationalism, preventing foreigners and their descendants from owning land. Through an example of a conflict in Tabou in which Burkinabé migrants were ejected from the land, the article shows how customary land values have been recreated to take on nationalistic, xenophobic values, according to which ethnic identities become conflated with distinctions between ‘indigenous’ and ‘foreign’, and land relations are defined as between ethnic groups rather than being contractual relations between individuals belonging to different groups: thus social identities become more exclusive.

Through a comparative analysis of two recent Tanzanian lawsuits concerning pastoralist–farmer disputes over land, this article argues that the judicial system is being employed as a vehicle for legitimizing dispossession. Wealthy elites who find their efforts to acquire vast tracts of land thwarted by protective mechanisms in the Land Act No. 4 of 1999 and Village Land Act No. 5 of 1999 are turning to the courts to get what they want. Having access to deeper pockets and being able to out-lawyer and out-manoeuvre their poorer and often less-educated opponents enables elites (including the government itself) to avail themselves of the judicial system and acquire land through illegitimate means. Yet our analysis also illustrates that Tanzanian courts at times act independently of political influence and secure property rights for at least some of the dispossessed. An unusual mix of conflicting pressures and key personalities in these two cases coalesced to produce unexpected outcomes in favour of the Maasai defendants, whose land and legitimacy were on the line. Winning, however, came at considerable cost.

Colonial contact created many African ‘traditions’ that are in fact novel; part of this process involved translation, in which cultural accommodations were determined not just by the political interests of negotiators but by the challenges of moving between languages and conceptual universes. This article focuses on the cultural translation of land tenure and property in colonial northern Nigeria, as legal paradigms and principles of governance. Beginning in the early colonial period, Western paradigms came to shape the ways colonial authorities understood indigenous landholding, which in turned influenced how they governed small-scale farmers. The article traces how different intellectual traditions came together to create a ‘traditional’ system of land tenure with very little purchase on past practices, and a somewhat attenuated relationship with the lives of ordinary farmers.

This article looks at ways in which communal area right holders in Zimbabwe attempt to add security to their land rights when faced with altered circumstances. Apart from quasi-legal means such as ad hoc diagrams, which were beyond the scope of this article, two principal strands were found by which land right security is bolstered. First, investment in interpersonal ties (both with the living and the dead), and second, ceremonies for forging and maintaining links with land. For both, it was found that traditional practices have been bent and adapted pragmatically to suit contemporary contexts. Increased mobility and remoteness from rural homes have also given rise to a degree of abstraction (for example, the symbolic use in urban settings of soil or grain brought from communal areas). Where both custom and formal law coexist pluralistically, custom has proved the more flexible of the two and, unless demonstrably better security is offered, it seems likely that custom will continue to be invoked and modified to provide security for new circumstances.

This article proposes an analytic framework to describe variation in forms of land-related conflict that emerge in widely varying circumstances and settings. Focusing on conflict among smallholders, the article suggests that these social processes can often be thought of as redistributive conflicts that are shaped by the land tenure regimes that govern land access and allocation. Land tenure regimes can be conceptualized schematically as constituted by rules about property, authority, jurisdiction and citizenship, and as differentiated along these dimensions. They define a locus of political authority over land rights at the local level, a territorial arena, social groups with different land rights and interests, and the distribution of political and economic powers and rights among them. These arrangements vary across space and over time, shaping the political arenas in which land rights are contested and producing different forms of land-related conflict. In many situations, these dimensions of land regimes are blurred, layered and changing, adding additional dimensions of complexity to land politics that the analysis proposed here may help to illuminate.