Is Land Inalienable? Historical and Current Debates on Land Transfers in Northern Ghana
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2620222 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carola Lentz (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 80 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 56-80 |
| Publication date | 2010-02-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Africa (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0001-9720 • E-ISSN: 1750-0184 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3366/e0001972009001260 |
| OpenAlex | W2113629896 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 37 |
| References cited | 23 |
The article traces the history of debates on land transfers in northern Ghana and discusses the ways in which African and European views on land tenure influenced and instrumentalized each other. Using the case of Nandom in the Upper West Region, I analyse how an expansionist group of Dagara farmers gained access to and legitimized control over land previously held by a group of Sisala hunters and farmers claiming to be the 'first-comers' to the area. Both groups acknowledge that the Sisala eventually transferred land to the Dagara immigrants, symbolically effected by the transmission of an earth-shrine stone. However, the Sisala interpret this historical event in terms of a 'gift', invoking the language of kinship and continued dependency, while the Dagara construe it in terms of a 'purchase', implicating exchange, equality and autonomy. These different perspectives, as well as colonial officials' ideas that land ownership was ultimately vested in the ancestors of the first-comer lineage and therefore 'inalienable', have shaped early disputes about the Nandom earth shrine and Dagara property rights. Competing conceptions of pre-colonial African land tenure continue to provide powerful arguments in current land conflicts, and shrinking land reserves as well as the political implications of landed property, in the context of decentralization policies, have exacerbated the debate on the 'inalienability' of land
Archaeology · Autonomy · Communal land · Context (archaeology · Expansionism · Geography · Kinship · Land law · Land tenure · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Property rights · Sociology · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Land Rights and Reforms · Law
Asian capitalism, primitive accumulation, and the new enclosures in Uganda
Land governance in Ghana and its implications for inclusive city development
Lógica espacial e experiência de longo termo
Conclusão
Ordem de chegada como princípio de hierarquia dos territórios
Introdução
Os conhecedores da história dos Nyanja
Divisão administrativa da província do Niassa
Pa Mtengo wa mai
Os habitantes da água, os Nyanja
Khamu
Chiwelewele cho tchelatchela – renegociar a comunidade
Antropologia, territorialização e historicidades
A delimitação das terras comunitárias em Cóbuè
Customary Legal Empowerment in Namibia and Ghana? Lessons about Access, Power and Participation in Non-state Justice Systems
Renegociar a comunidade e disputar territórios
How to combine tradition and modernity? Regulating customary land management in Ghana
A review of practices for sustaining urban and peri-urban agriculture
Tamale
Investment impacts of gendered land rights in customary tenure systems
Neoliberal globalisation and evolving local traditional institutions
Blockchain on stool land acquisition
Land governance in Northern Ghana
The role of chiefs in large-scale land acquisitions for jatropha production in Ghana
The politics of customary land rights transformation in peri-urban Ghana
Powers of exclusion and counter-exclusion
Water and land investment in the “overseas” of Northern Ghana
The making of the social order – migration, resource and power conflicts in the Moroccan Drâa Valley
Chiefs do not talk law, most of them talk power.” Traditional authorities in conflicts over land grabbing in Ghana
Benchmarking property institutions
Nas terras do lago Niassa
Land Access, Agricultural Land Use Changes and Narratives about Land Degradation in the Savannahs of Northeast Ghana during the Pre-Colonial and Colonial Periods
In The Land of the Chiefs
Lineage and land reforms in Malawi
Political Structure and the Limits of Recognition and Representation in Ghana
Negotiated or Negated? The Rhetoric and Reality of Customary Tenure in an Ashanti Village in Ghana
Land Regimes and the Structure of Politics
African Agrarian Systems
Early modern conceptions of property
The Transformation of Property Rights in the Gold Coast
Law in Colonial Africa
Local Politics and the Dynamics of Property in Africa
Law, custom, and social order
The enigma of colonialism
Power in Ghana from Early Colonial Times to the 1990s
Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana
Of Trees and Earth Shrines
The Natives of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast
Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana
Arrows and Earth Shrines
Of Hunters, Goats and Earth-Shrines
Histoire du peuplement et relations interethniques au Burkina Faso
The Northern Territories of the Gold Coast1
The Social Organization of the LoWiili
The State, Development and Politics in Ghana
Question foncière et construction nationale en Côte d'Ivoire
La situation de guerre dans l'arène villageoise
Fields of Social Control Among the LoDagaba
Die Erde in Vorstellungswelt und Kultpraktiken der sudanischen Volker
| Unique citing works | 37 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,06 |
| Citation span | 2008 - 2026 (19) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 36 |