Land Question In Africa Research Articles

On whose land is the city to be built? Farmers, donors and the urban land question in Beira city, Mozambique

A new era of global interventionism in African cities is emerging, the implications of which for existing claims to urban space are poorly understood. This is particularly true for the claims of farmers. Despite being a ubiquitous feature of many African cities, urban agriculture broadly exists in a conceptual limbo between rurality and urbanity, largely invisible to urban governance and substantive scholarship. Based on the case of Beira, Mozambique, in this article we make urban agriculture empirically and conceptually visible within the context of emerging debates on the urban land question in Africa. Through a historical–political analysis, we demonstrate how urban farming has constituted a distinct feature of Beira’s urbanism, which has evolved amidst successive and contradictory state-land regimes. Moving to the present day, we demonstrate how a new urban regime has emerged out of a coalition of municipal leaders and international donors with the aim of erasing all traces of urban agriculture from the city through urban ‘development’. The findings demonstrate that there is a need for a better understanding of the manifold claims to urban space, outside of slum urbanism alone, in contemporary land rights debates. We conclude by arguing that there is a need for a substantive land rights agenda that transcends the prescriptive categories of urbanism and rurality by focusing instead on the universal land question.

The urban land question in Africa: The case of urban land conflicts in the City of Lusaka, 100 years after its founding

Pressure on urban land is growing in many cities across Africa and the developing world. This is creating various challenges around urban land administration, planning and development. Growing pressure on urban land is manifesting in various ways including the mounting urban land conflicts. In this paper we look at the urban land question in Lusaka, focussing on urban land conflicts. What we have found in this study is that the reportedly growing invasion of vacant or idle land in Lusaka is a more complex issue which involves not only the desperate urban poor looking for land to squat on, but also well-resourced groups, who sometimes hire poor people to invade the land on which they later develop residential and commercial properties. We argue in the paper that the prevalence of these conflicts points to the gap in the administration, planning and delivery of land and the accompanying services.

1 - Land in the Political Economy of African Development: Alternative Strategies for Reform

Since 2000, there has been an escalation of land-related conflicts in Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire, the Delta region of Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa. These con- flicts are examples of numerous national struggles for access to land in Africa and reflect the failure of the African state to address the land and development nexus on the continent. The land question in Africa is a by-product of globalised control of land, natural resources and minerals in general, reflecting incomplete decolonisation processes in ex-settler colonies along with the penchant for for- eign ‘investment’ in a neo-liberal policy framework that marginalises the rural and urban poor. Global finance capital is increasingly entangled in conflicts over land, as the exploitation of oil, minerals and natural resources expands into new African enclaves that highlight the external dimension of distorted devel- opment. These processes define the significance of land in the political economy of African development. This paper examines the complex social and political contradictions that shape land struggles, including their colonial and post-inde- pendence trajectory. The failures of neo-liberal land reforms, based on market forces and their confrontation by popular demands for redistributive reforms are discussed.

Debating the Land Question in Africa

In February 2000, twenty years after their victories brought Rhodesia's ruling white regime to the conference table, veterans of Zimbabwe's war of liberation began to occupy some of the large privately owned commercial farms that controlled Zimbabwe's most valuable land. During the next few weeks, thousands of people followed suit: by May, nearly a third of the country's large-scale commercial farms had been seized (New York Times, 27 May 2000; Moyo 1998). Armed with a court order, landowners demanded that the “squatters” be evicted, but the police demurred, and President Mugabe refused to order them to carry out the court's instructions. A few weeks earlier, voters had rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have strengthened the President's powers to seize white-owned land, without compensation, for redistribution to land-hungry blacks. Angry over the deteriorating economy, rising levels of corruption, and Zimbabwe's costly involvement in Congo's civil war, a majority of those who voted were unwilling to increase the President's powers, even if they supported the cause of land reform. When the veterans took matters into their own hands, Mugabe lost no time in associating with their cause. He, in turn, was accused by Western governments, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, and the international press, of sacrificing the rule of law in order to save his own political skin.