Landrights and the politics of belonging in West Africa: Workshop in Frankfurt/M., 3-5 Oct. 2002

Call for papers

Proposal for an international workshop in Frankfurt/M., 3-5 October 2002
Landrights and the politics of belonging in West Africa
organisers: Special Research Project 268, "West African Savanna" and the Institute for An-thropology and African Studies, University Mainz (Carola Lentz/ Richard Kuba)

In most West African societies, mobility has played and continues to play an important role. In many regions of the continent, the natural environment places little restriction on move-ment, and important economic activities such as pastoralism, slash-and-burn agriculture or trade require migrations of varying scope. The history of many villages has been repeatedly characterised by the arrival and settlement of new groups and the departure of others; in some cases, we can even speak of the systematic practice of multilocality. This mobility has im-plied, and still implies, multiple encounters of different languages, cultural practices, political systems and religious beliefs. Sometimes, these encounters have resulted in mutual assimila-tion and the erasure of differences; but we also see instances of difference being emphasised, as in distinguishing first-comers and late-comers, and hardening ethnic boundaries.

Mobility and expanding settlement frontiers do not imply nor presuppose that the access to land and other resources was ever unproblematic. The dominant paradigm that land in Africa was a free and plentiful good, that political control tended to be over people rather than over land and that Africans are indifferent to rootedness in physical space needs to be reassessed. In fact, recent research on the agricultural expansion of segmentary societies points to the importance the pioneers attached to the material and ritual control of the new territories into which they moved. Competition over resources of land, water, pasture and trees between "first-comers" and "late-comers" and between agriculturalists and pastoralists, often ex-pressed in the idiom of ethnic difference, seems to be a phenomenon of longue durée. Territo-rial cults and institutions, such as the earth priest, mediated between man and nature but also between the different social groups cohabiting in the same environment. These institutions can back the interests the "first-comers" against "late-comers" or pastoralists with different notions of landrights.

In addition, the colonial (and postcolonial) state created even more layers of rights, perceptions, interests and strategies with respect to land. The strategies of mobility and the appro-priation of land and other resources were transformed by the new international and internal administrative boundaries and by the states' attempts to restrict the residential mobility of the population. Local customary systems of land use and interethnic relations were also affected by the introduction of new institutions such as chieftaincy. Moreover, new state laws on land tenure, which are usually based on a simple binary opposition between private and collective ownership of resources, paid little attention to the multi-layered traditional local systems of land use rights. Policies of "mise en valeur" of land resources, state-controlled settlement schemes and the designation of forest and wild life reserves constitute further challenges to older institutional arrangements.

The workshop conveners invite participants to present new research findings as well as theo-retical reflections on both the historical and the contemporary dimensions of these multiple layers of landrights and interethnic relations in rural West Africa. Papers could address vari-ous issues, for example the transformation of the role of the earth priest in the distribution of land and as mediator in land conflicts; different concepts of land property; the changing relations between pastoralists and agriculturalists; the hardening boundaries between "autoch-thones" and "immigrants"; the recent problematic attempts by some West African states to implement a land reform that takes local customary land rights into account; or the history of state-introduced settlement schemes and their subsequent "re-traditionalisation".

Here is the list of participants.
To help you find Frankfurt as accomodating as possible, we collected some information on hotels for you.