SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This study traces the historical development of land tenure in Kinyanambo village, Mufindi District, Tanzania, from pre-colonial times to the present day. It demonstrates the evolution of a predominantly Individualised land market and the gradual commoditisation of land, processes which originated in the long-term commoditisation of agriculture and which were energised by the arrival of non-African settlers from the 1920s. Land tenure evolved more or less independently of national land tenure policy until 1974. Villagisation then altered the evolutionary path of the local land tenure system, marking a fundamental breakpoint in people’s understandings of their land rights and in the local social and political system. Together with the birth of Mafinga town, it created the conditions for the rapid and more geographically concentrated growth of the local population, for urbanisation, and for associated changes in livelihoods, land use, and in relations between people and land. By 2000, following subsequent economic reforms, Kinyanambo had a deep-rooted, widespread and socially legitimate market in land. Although people’s access to land can be eased by their social and political connections, the market is now the primary means of access to land in Kinyanambo - anyone with money can obtain land, provided that they follow the correct local procedures. Yet Kinyanambo's land market has evolved in the face of Tanzania's official discourse on land and the local land tenure system thus contains many problematic tensions, arising from this split between custom and law. In analysing land tenure and social change particular attention is paid to wealth, gender and 'uenyeji' and to the links between livelihoods and land. This study demonstrates the value of the property rights approach to land tenure, as the basis of an eclectic analytical approach which is historically and empirically grounded and incorporates solid analysis of social relations and political power.