Land-Related Conflicts in Uchagga, 1960-2000

Abstract

Land scarcity and its related conflicts are a serious problem facing the Chagga people of Moshi Rural District in the Kilimanjaro region. The problem started during the colonial period when a massive amount of land was grabbed by the colonial governments and some was acquired by colonial missionaries. As a result, the Chagga were dispossessed of the land they had reserved for future use. Although much of the land alienated by the colonial authorities was nationalised after independence, the problem of land scarcity lingered, due to population pressure. The net result of this situation was an increased incidence of land grabbing, encroachment, eviction, misdistribution of land, and perpetuation of family conflicts including gender-related injustices. Post-colonial agrarian reform policies such as villagization and liberalisation created the tendency to privatize land and intensify the market for it, which exacerbated conflicts over land at the local level. I argue that land scarcity, as a cause of land-related conflicts, resulted not only from population pressure, but also from competitive land use as well as political and cultural factors. My argument is premised on the assumption that the forces behind land-related conflicts in Africa, as observed by Ward Anseeuw and Chris Alden (2010), do not behave logically. The paper sheds light on the complexity of land conflicts by analysing their political, economic, cultural and historical dimensions. The political economy approach, normative quest theory and scarcity school of thought is used to analyse the complexity of the land crisis in Uchagga.