African land questions, agrarian transitions and the state: the contradictions of neo-liberal land reforms, by Sam Moyo, Dakar, CODESRIA Working Paper Series, 2009, vii + 159 pp., £18.95, ISBN 978-2869782020
The land question has recently attracted renewed interest in the political agenda of several African countries and international organisations, while from a different vantage point the resurgence of peasant movements as well as urban mobilisations in Latin America, Asia and Africa makes explicit the escalating contradictions over the control, access and use of land. In this book Sam Moyo explores, through a variety of rich empirical case studies, the political relevance of land questions in Africa. The author locates land questions and the preceding process of dispossession as the fulcrum of colonial capitalist patterns of domination and exploitation. Moyo moves beyond the classic ‘agrarian question’, understood in terms of the transformation of social relations of production and property in the countryside with the advent of a capitalist mode of production. Through a more complex and multilayered approach he exposes the interaction of different variables of class, nation, gender, patriarchy, race and ethnicity in shaping the theoretical outlines of African land questions and the trajectories of agrarian transitions. He defines two main forms of transition emerging from distinct paths of accumulation and domination ‘from above and from below’. The former may be identified in settler-dominated areas, especially Southern Africa, where patterns of dispossession and accumulation were more extensive and historically destructive for African peasantries and their social modes of political authority and economic organisation. Here colonial dispossession, although never complete, reached its most brutal forms. In West Africa, in contrast, diverse structures and patterns of landholding emerged from local agrarian power differentiation which encouraged local elites to amass large landholding amidst growing land scarcities and landlessness.
Moyo articulates the land questions in terms of massive unevenness in the distribution of productive resources, posing the urgency for redistributive land and agrarian reforms. However, while the alarming issue of uneven access and rights to land is of central significance, the author underlines that significant processes of accumulation and exclusion also occur within so-called ‘communal’ tenure. The theme of tenure (in)security in Africa, of crucial relevance to the majority of smallholders, has a peculiar gender and generational character. While women (and to some extent children) represent the backbone of agrarian economy and society by virtue of their productive and reproductive functions, their role in decision making within the household or community often remains minimal. Moyo's explanation of the process of exclusion of women from property rights and decision making reveals its conflictual nature. He traces the origins of the process within ‘traditional’ ‘communal’ African society and its interaction with or subordination to the colonial structure of dominance. The practices of indirect rule allowed colonial masters to decentralise power using the authority of local chiefs. This ‘tribalized’ African chiefdoms, closing them into confined units in contrast to the greater fluidity, openness and interaction of pre-colonial chiefdoms, while at the same time profoundly altering the nature of women's and youths' roles within communal society. Thus in the case of colonial Natal the creation of the Native Code in 1870 undermined the position of women and children, making their subservience to the patriarchs and traditional senior classes stronger and harsher. While male control of women's productive and reproductive power was a feature of pre-colonial institutions and power relations, this was further exacerbated and entrenched under the colonial pattern of domination and exploitation which altered, aggravated and distorted relations between men and women, between patriarchs and youths and between chiefs and subjects.
Moyo puts this framework into dialogue with two additional variables to grasp the differentia specifica of African agrarian transitions, investigating the ethnic and regional differentiation and diversification in land access, control and distribution. Here the need for an epistemology of complexity in understanding agrarian transitions is demonstrated. The concept of invented traditions is employed to explain how ethnic differences were manufactured, distorted or created ex novo, and encapsulated within a hierarchical framework of domination and competition. Following the principle of divide and rule, colonial authorities drew artificial geographical lines and borders so as to separate newly created ethnic entities – defined through the racial colonial language of ‘tribes’ – while at the same time recognising and assigning differential powers to different ethnic authorities. The construction of a mosaic of ethnicities structured by the uneven allocation of land and powers had irreversible consequences for the political stability of post-independence African countries. Examining the case of Côte d'Ivoire, Moyo explores the politicised character of land in contemporary Africa. Here, through the articulation of the politics of ‘ivoirité’, access to and control of land has been closely tied to citizenship. The subordination of citizenship to national belonging, and the exclusion of all people of other nationalities regardless of their rights acquired by virtue of long-term permanence, originated during the French colonial empire and was consolidated in the exercise of Houphuetist rule. Recent conflicts over access to natural resources, with variegated cleavages of ethnic and regional character, further expand the variety of ongoing struggles in the countryside while exposing the limits of discourses and practices of ethno-nationalism.
The last chapter traces the resurgence of rural social movements and their struggles and organisation in relation to land rights and land reform. Moyo envisages the massive participation of rural social movements as the driving force necessary for the implementation of genuinely progressive land and agrarian reforms against neoliberalism. This requires a programme of land redistribution and rural transformation aimed at restructuring existing structures of power and relations of property and production against landlessness, poverty and immiseration of peasants. He is critical of the concept of social change brought about by civil society participation, good governance and transparency. In his view this undermines social movements' radicalism while at the same time establishing the limits to political action within the framework of representation.
This richly researched book recasts the political actuality and relevance of land questions in Africa. Some critics have argued for a ‘solution’ of the classical agrarian question of capital in Africa, and for the emergence of an agrarian question of labour. This characterisation is useful as it addresses the issue of chronic labour redundancy, the fragmentation of labour, and the systemic and functional nature of labour migration in the rural context. However, rather than being ‘solved’, the emerging processes of resistance among rural communities are, on one hand, redefining the political significance and the persistence of land and agrarian questions in Africa, while on the other, manifesting today the reproduction of fractures and social divisions created during the colonial era.