Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of attachment in Africa, by Parker Shipton

Abstract

Policy makers have regarded land titling programmes as the panacea for Africa’s crisis-ridden agriculture. Titling farmland as individual private property was to enhance tenure security, thereby encouraging farmers to invest in the land’s long-term fertility. Most importantly, land titles could serve as collateral for loans that would enable an expansion in production, thus improving rural livelihoods and contributing to development. Kenya, as the first sub-Saharan African country to initiate a nationwide land titling programme, provides an interesting case to test the validity of the ‘freehold-mortgage doctrine’, as Parker Shipton calls it. Using observations from long-term fieldwork among the Luo of Western Kenya, archival material, and land commission reports, the author argues that the country’s state-led agrarian reform has not only failed to meet expectations but also engendered unintended consequences. Besides excluding women and pastoralists from obtaining property rights, state land titles have generally not increased security of tenure. Land registers are notoriously prone to obsolescence, because after the initial titling, people do not register further transactions. Furthermore older rights and claims linked to popular ideas about lineage-owned landholdings continue to be pressed. Therefore, official titles notwithstanding, ownership of any piece of land may be hotly contested. Moreover, because the foreclosure of mortgaged land is usually difficult to implement, state and private lenders have been reluctant to provide loans to land-entitled farmers who are not politically well connected or economically powerful. The underlying reason for the titling programme’s problems, however, is, in Shipton’s view the underlying reason for the titling programme’s problems is not administrative inefficiency but, on the one hand, the incongruence of ‘the grand design of linked land and capital markets and of the mortgage that is its quintessence’ (p. 7) and on the other African ideas about land and belonging.