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Five - Falling Between Two Stools: How womens land rights are lost between state & customary law in Apac District, Northern Uganda
- Edited by Birgit Englert, Universität Wien, Austria, Elizabeth Daley
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- Book:
- Women's Land Rights and Privatization in Eastern Africa
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 03 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2008, pp 101-120
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Summary
Introduction
As in other countries in Africa, there are two parallel and competing histories of land tenure in Uganda. The indigenous systems evolved to suit the needs of different local groups, or at least certain elite members in those groups, in a variety of different ecological and economic circumstances. They worked on rules which have never been written down, making it easy for outsiders to consider all these systems as ‘customary tenure’ a single, unchanging system of rules and administration. Another, written, history began with British colonialism. The British introduced a system of freehold title under which client chiefs and kingdoms (as well as missions) were granted formal land rights. All land which was not registered was considered by the British to be ‘crown land’. Although customary tenure continued to operate on this land, the customary owners had little protection from the arbitrary expropriation of their property. The British colonial administrators regarded customary ownership as backward and a constraint to economic development, which by the 1950s they intended to replace with the ‘modern’ system of freehold. However, colonialism ended before this could be implemented.
On independence in 1962, crown land became public land, which made little difference to most people. The old colonial opinions on the primitiveness of customary tenure were deeply engrained (and remain so today, as we shall see). As a result, Uganda, like many other newly independent countries, experimented with nationalizing land, another way of trying to replace the ‘backwardness’ of customary tenure with a ‘modern’ system. This was supposed to allow for more ‘rational’ allocation of land. Still, the customary tenure systems continued to operate, though without legal status. From 1975, with the Land Reform Decree, land owners were effectively merely the occupiers of their land, which they held ‘under sufferance’ – meaning that possession of their land could be taken by the government whenever it wanted. Some land was indeed taken and given on leasehold to people who would now be termed ‘investors’ – in practice often civil servants, businessmen or those with political connections. The real ‘owners’ of the land had no rights at all.
More recently, nationalization of land and other natural resources went out of favour in Uganda as in the rest of the world, and the ‘backwardness’ of customary tenure is instead now contrasted with the assumed superiority of private individual freehold.
Afterword: Securing womens land rights
- Edited by Birgit Englert, Universität Wien, Austria, Elizabeth Daley
-
- Book:
- Women's Land Rights and Privatization in Eastern Africa
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 03 March 2023
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2008, pp 158-175
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- Chapter
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Summary
What Remains to be Done?
With this book we have tried to offer a nuanced picture of how the issues of privatization, gender relations and land rights are currently interacting in Eastern Africa as a contribution to the debate on how women's rights can best be secured in the overarching context of the increasing ‘privatization’ of land tenure. The detailed and differentiated analysis of what is happening on the ground that has been presented herein points up once more the continuing invalidity of some of the more common assumptions about women's rights to land in Eastern Africa, and the limits to securing them through policy and legislation alone. Women are not powerless actors, and the case study chapters of this volume in particular have provided ample illustration of the multiple and creative ways which women have found to claim and ensure their rights to land. We therefore hope that, collectively, we have provided fresh inspiration to all those who are in a position to change the situation for the better. It remains only to ask: What still needs to be done? How can women best be supported in their continuing struggles over land?
Drawing on all the contributions to this volume, and co-authored by all the contributors, this Afterword therefore aims to suggest the best ways forward in securing land rights for women. In the following sections, we first make some general observations about the impact of land tenure privatization on women's land rights thus far, and then examine how the new policies and laws address women's rights. In drawing together our conclusions we focus, first, on the best ways to implement the new policies and laws and, second, on the importance of civil society in supporting women's land rights more broadly.