Customary Land Tenure, Inheritance Rules, and Smallholder Farmers in Malawi

Bibliographic Data

ID7429300
AuthorsTsutomu Takane (Tokyo University of Agriculture, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume34
Issue2
Pages269-291
Publication date2008-05-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Southern African Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0305-7070 • E-ISSN: 1465-3893
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/03057070802037969
OpenAlexW2063831843
LanguageEN
Citations received33
References cited8

This article examines the interrelationship between smallholder strategies to obtain land and customary land tenure and inheritance rules in contemporary Malawi. Based on village surveys in diverse regions of Malawi, it highlights how most land transactions followed customary rules but also explores significant deviations. The reasons for transfers deviating from customary norms included unique personal relationships between landholders and heirs, wives returning to patrilineal villages, and intensifying land scarcity. Yet the effects of land scarcity were contradictory, as it not only induced individuals to obtain land by any means possible, but also encouraged the obstruction of flexible land transfers to prevent lineage land from being alienated to non-kin, suggesting a conflict between individual and lineage strategies. The article also examines vernacular land markets, which are limited in scale and provide different opportunities for poor and wealthy farmers. By highlighting both the adaptive and negotiable nature of customary land systems and a trend towards enhanced inequality, this study seeks to capture the complex reality of Malawian agrarian dynamics. Notes *I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their valuable suggestions and comments. I am also grateful to the Centre for Social Research, University of Malawi, for providing an excellent research environment during my stay in Malawi. Financial support for this study was provided by the Institute of Developing Economies. 1 E.R. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology (London, Athlone Press, 1961). This critique has also been made in ethnographic terms by Englund in the study of contemporary Malawi. See H. Englund, From War to Peace on the Mozambique-Malawi Borderland (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2002). 2 J.L. Comaroff and S. Roberts, Rules and Processes: The Cultural Logic of Dispute in an African Context (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1981). 3 S.F. Moore, Social Facts and Fabrications: ‘Customary’ Law on Kilimanjaro, 1880–1980 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 319. 4 M. Chanock, Law, Custom and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also T. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 211–262. 5 S. Berry, No Condition is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Wisconsin, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); B.L. Shadle, ‘“Changing Traditions to Meet Current Altering Conditions”: Customary Law, African Courts and the Rejection of Codification in Kenya, 1930–60’, Journal of African History, 40 (1999), pp. 411–431. 6 R.M. Mkandawire, ‘Customary Land, the State and Agrarian Change in Malawi: The Case of the Chewa Peasantry in the Lilongwe Rural Development Project’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 3, 1/2 (1984), pp. 109–128; P.E. Peters ‘Against the Odds: Matriliny, Land and Gender in the Shire Highlands of Malawi’, Critique of Anthropology, 17, 2 (1997), pp. 7–26; P.E. Peters, ‘Bewitching Land: The Role of Land Disputes in Converting Kin to Strangers and in Class Formation in Malawi’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 28, 1 (2002), pp. 155–178; P.E. Peters, ‘Whose Security? Deepening Social Conflict Over “Customary” Land in the Shadow of Land Tenure Reform in Malawi’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 45, 3 (2007), pp. 447–472; P. Kishindo, ‘Land Tenure: the Case of the Salima District, Central Malawi’, Malawi Journal of Social Science, 16 (1997), pp. 57–67; P. Kishindo, ‘Dynamics of Land Tenure: A Village Case Study’, in T. Takane (ed.), Current Issues of Rural Development in Malawi (Chiba, Institute of Developing Economies, 2006), pp. 1–22, available at http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Publish/Ars/pdf/12_cap1.pdf, retrieved on 7 September 2007. 7 Berry, No Condition is Permanent. 8 P.E. Peters, ‘Inequality and Social Conflict Over Land in Africa’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 4, 3 (2004), pp. 269–314. Also see Peters, ‘Bewitching Land’. 9 Peters, ‘Inequality and Social Conflict’, p. 305. 10 A. Chimhowu and P. Woodhouse, ‘Customary vs Private Property Rights? Dynamics and Trajectories of Vernacular Land Markets in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 6, 3 (2006), pp. 346–371. 11 Chimhowu and Woodhouse, ‘Customary vs Private Property Rights’, pp. 359–60. 12 A household is defined here as a unit of co-residence and agricultural production. In most cases, it is also a unit of consumption. However, members of poor households that exhausted their maize stocks in the hungry season ate at relatives' households. Vaughan provides useful discussion on the problem of the unit of analysis in the context of rural Malawi. See M. Vaughan, ‘Which Family?: Problems in the Reconstruction of the History of the Family as an Economic and Cultural Unit’, Journal of African History, 24, 2 (1983), pp. 275–83; M. Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and Famine in Twentieth-Century Malawi (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987). 13 T. Takane, ‘Gambling with Liberalization: Smallholder Livelihoods in Contemporary Rural Malawi’, IDE Discussion Paper No. 117 (Chiba, Institute of Developing Economies, 2007), available at , retrieved on 7 September 2007. 14 P. Kishindo, ‘Customary Land Tenure and the New Land Policy in Malawi’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 22, 2 (2004), pp. 213–25. 15 Government of Malawi, Malawi National Land Policy (Lilongwe, Ministry of Lands and Housing, 2001). 16 Government of Malawi, Final Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry on Land Policy Reform, Volume 1, Main Report (Lilongwe, 1999), p. 63. 17 In this article, gifting refers to cases where a person obtains land from a relative while the relative is still alive. Inheritance refers to cases where someone obtains land after the death of the original landholder. 18 P. Kishindo, ‘Differential Security of Tenure on Malawi's Customary Land: Implications for Investment’, Development Southern Africa, 12, 2 (1995), pp. 167–74; P. Peters, ‘Agricultural Commercialization, Rural Economy and Household Livelihoods, 1990–1997’, (Harvard Institute for International Development, 1999); Peters, ‘Bewitching Land’; Mkandawire, ‘Customary Land’. 19 M. Read, The Ngoni of Nyasaland (London, Oxford University Press, 1956). 20 Peters, ‘Bewitching Land’; Kishindo, ‘Land Tenure’ 21 K.M. Phiri, ‘Some Changes in the Matrilineal Family System Among the Chewa of Malawi Since the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History, 24, 2 (1983), p. 258. Vaughan also points out the lack of fit between socio-economic realities and people's public expression of their culture in rural Malawi. See Vaughan, ‘Which Family?’. 22 C. Brantley, ‘Through Ngoni Eyes: Margaret Read's Matrilineal Interpretations from Nyasaland’, Critique of Anthropology, 17, 2 (1997), pp. 147–69; J.I. Guyer, ‘Household and Community in African Studies’, African Studies Review, 26, 2/3 (1981), pp. 87–137. 23 Some of the original settlers, including the senior brother who later became village headman, were still alive at the time of the survey. 24 R.M. Mkandawire, ‘The Land Question and Agrarian Change in Malawi’, in G.C.Z. Mhone (ed.), Malawi at the Crossroads: The Post-colonial Political Economy (Harare, Sapes Books, 1992); Kishindo, ‘Customary Land’. 25 Inheritance of land from father to children was also reported by Mkandawire in the Lilongwe Rural Development Project and by Englund in the Dedza District. See Mkandawire, ‘Customary Land’; H. Englund, ‘Waiting for the Portuguese: Nostalgia, Exploitation and the Meaning of Land in the Malawi-Mozambique Borderland’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 14, 2 (1996), pp. 157–72; H. Englund, ‘The Self in Self-Interest: Land, Labour and Temporalities in Malawi's Agrarian Change’, Africa, 69, 1 (1999), pp. 139–59. 26 In the four cases, the average landholding size of the husband was 0.897 hectares, while that of the wife was 0.354 hectares. 27 There were two cases in which the villagers obtained land rights through the village headman's allocation. In both cases, land had been allocated a long time ago, in 1987 and 1949. 28 Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Tumbuka followed matrilineal inheritance and uxorilocal residence. However, after being conquered by the patrilineal Ngoni around 1855, the Tumbuka gradually adopted Ngoni-patterned patrilineality, virilocal residence, and bridewealth payments. See L. Vail and L. White, ‘Tribalism in the Political History of Malawi’, in L. Vail (ed.), The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (London, James Currey, 1989), pp. 151–92. 29 In six of the cases, land was obtained by women. These cases will be examined later. 30 Case 4 was not a sample household and therefore not counted in Table 1. 31 This echoes the observation made by Moore and Vaughan in northern Zambia that rights regarding land are ‘historically determined, often being bound up with the biography of particular individuals’. H.L. Moore and M. Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (Portsmouth, NC, Heinemann, 1994), p. 210. 32 Peters, ‘Land Tenure’. 33 D. Potts, ‘Rural Mobility as a Response to Land Shortages: The Case of Malawi’, Population, Space and Place, 12 (2006), pp. 291–311. 34 A 1/50,000 scale map, produced by the Department of Surveys based on aerial photography done in 1970, showed nothing but ‘orchard bush’ and no settlement in the area today covered by Belo. 35 The only exception was the original settler of Kachamba, who purchased land from the local chief in 1953. 36 Chimhowu and Woodhouse, ‘Customary vs Private Property Rights’, pp. 357–58. 37 The case of the original settler in Kachamba who purchased land in 1953 is excluded here. 38 Income quartiles were obtained by ranking all sample households in each village studied according to income per adult equivalent unit and dividing them into four equal groups. For the income disparities among the sample households, see Takane, ‘Gambling with Liberalization’. 39 Peters, ‘Land Tenure’. 40 Chimhowu and Woodhouse, ‘Customary vs Private Property Rights

Customary land · Inheritance · Scarcity · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Land Rights and Reforms · Urban and Rural Development Challenges

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