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Reflections on a quota system for tribal land allocation in peri-urban areas in Botswana
Abstract
On 25 April 2013, President Ian Khama (2008–2018) announced a controversial quota system for tribal land allocation in the peri-urban villages in Botswana at a kgotla (village) meeting in Bokaa in the Kgatleng District. Khama informed the villagers that under the land quota system, ‘preferential treatment’ would be given to the ‘locals’ when allocating tribal land in the peri-urban villages. Botswana’s parliament had rejected a motion on the same quota system tabled by an independent member of parliament. It also rejected attempts to bring it back through drafts of the land policy in 2013 and 2014, and the land policy in July 2015. President Khama invoked his executive powers in late 2015 to have it implemented. This policy is inconsistent with the Tribal Land Act and the Constitution of Botswana, and undermined Botswana’s Vision 2016. However, putting the law aside, it should be viewed from a social justice perspective.
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This article argues that hostile confrontations between state and societal actors pursuing divergent goals can sometimes end up empowering both. In Botswana, successful efforts by less powerful clients to reclaim the power to allocate land from land boards through various stratagems ended up also strengthening the land boards and also the state. By tricking land boards into legitimizing plots on which they had squatted, clients brought their land interests to the awareness of the land board and contributed to bettering land board records. The better records enable land boards to allocate land and resolve disputes in more informed ways. Better records also provide state officials with valuable information that various state agencies can use to tax, police, plan and implement various social projects better. In presenting this argument, the article contributes to the state-in-society discourse by showing that we need not limit the possibility of positive sum gains to situations where state and societal actors collaborate toachieve mutual goals.
There is a tendency in the post-modernist literature to assume that the globalization process characterized by mobility of people, goods, capital, and ideas, and the subsequent erosion of spatially bounded social worlds (Stepputat 1994: 176) has led to deterritorialization of identity and, as a result, people, regardless of their territorial origin, have become or are in the process of becoming citizens of a deterritorialized global world. This paper argues that the globalization process has not been accompanied by opening of borders to those who are forced to flee in search of safety. Though globalization has effectively reduced the capability of smaller states to shape their national macro-economic policies, their ability or determination to deny access to asylum seekers has not diminished. In fact global interconnectedness notwithstanding, the propensity of many societies, including formerly 'cohesive' ones, to define themselves on the basis of their ethnic, national or spatial origin, or religion, as well as culturally and ethnically distinct territorial locations, by excluding those whom they consider as 'others', has never been greater. Thus, place still remains a major repository of rights and membership. The assumption that identities are deterritorialized and state territories are readily there for the taking, regardless of place or national origin, has no objective existence outside the minds of its proponents. In a world where rights such as equal treatment, access to sources of livelihoods, social services, rights of freedom of movement and residence, etc. are apportioned on the basis of territorially anchored identities, the identity people gain from their association with a particular place is an indispensable instrument to a socially and economically fulfilling life. The corollary is that despite the process of globalization, repatriation still represents one of the most important solutions to the problem of involuntary displacement.
By examining two villages in Pos Iskandar, Tasek Bera, the article shows that Semelai have a sense of grouping based on consanguinity, where parents, married children and siblings live in proximity, which traditionally formed a kampong (village). This contributes to the resilience of the communal land tenure system. Today, however, land is seen as property and this has led to its informal inclusion in the Semelai concept of pesakak manah (inheritance). While Semelai try to maintain their living arrangements, individual and inherited property rights in land are emerging. Land remains deeply embedded in kin-based relationships, but the legitimacy of land rights is predominantly grounded in law and legislation rather than in the customary norms of kinship and communal land tenure that is based on relationality. The moral underpinnings of land rights should, therefore, be anchored in a relational perspective that draws from kinship and the communal land tenure system.
There are rising public concerns about the acquisition of prime land by non-citizens/foreigners in Botswana, especially in the sprawling urban and peri-urban areas. Indians, Nigerians and Chinese, among others, are allegedly involved in such land transactions. There is a salient local resentment towards them and/or such transactions. Sensational media reports, emotive public statements by politicians, chiefs and government officials, and anger from ordinary citizens dominate the discourse. These emotive public debates about this issue warrant some academic comment. This article argues that the acquisition of land by foreigners in Botswana, in each land category—tribal, state and freehold—is legally allowed by the relevant laws. But this does not mean that citizens have no right to raise concerns and/or show their disapproval of some of these legal provisions. Aware of the public outcry, the government has since passed the Land Policy in 2015, revised in 2019, and amended the Tribal Land Act in 2018, not yet operational, to try and strictly regulate the acquisition of land by non-citizens. There is no readily available statistical data, indicating the ownership of land by foreigners in each land category. This issue is multifaceted and needs to be cautiously handled, lest it breeds xenophobia or the anti-foreigner sentiments.
The North East District has the most contentious land question in post-colonial Botswana. Most of its land was expropriated by a colonial syndicate called the Tati Concessions (Tati Company) in the 1880s. Chunks of said land are still held under freehold titles resulting in the district experiencing severe land scarcity, especially for communal use. In a continuous effort to address this problem, the government purchased 19 freehold farms between 2005 and 2008 (about 20000 hectares) for redistribution. The process was carried out under the leadership of the Tati Land Board and North East District Administration while the chiefs and their communities were marginalised. This oversight and marginalisation of traditional leaders and their communities undermine the Chieftainship Act, which mandates the chiefs to actively promote the welfare of their tribes, inform them about developments and government policies. Using the participatory democracy theory, the article examines this land reform from the point of view of the local chiefs. It concludes that the marginalisation of the chiefs amounted to ‘community exclusion’ rendering the reform anti-redistributive.
This empirically grounded study provides a critical reflection on the land question in Africa, research on which tends to be tangential, conceptually loose and generally inadequate. It argues that the most pressing research concern must be to understand the precise nature of the African land question, its land reforms and their effects on development. To unravel the roots of land conflicts in Africa requires thorough understanding of the complex social and political contradictions which have ensued from colonial and post-colonial land policies, as well as from Africa's 'development' and capital accumulation trajectories, especially with regard to the land rights of the continent's poor. The study thus questions the capacity of emerging neo-liberal economic and political regimes in Africa to deliver land reforms which address growing inequality and poverty. It equally questions the understanding of the nature of popular demands for land reforms by African states, and their ability to address these demands under the current global political and economic structures dictated by neo-liberalism and its narrow regime of ownership. The study invites scholars and policy makers to creatively draw on the specific historical trajectories and contemporary expression of the land and agrarian questions in Africa, to enrich both theory and practice on land in Africa. © Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2008. All rights reserved.
Why do some political leaders create and strengthen institutions like title registries and land tribunals thatsecure property rights to land while others neglect these institutions or destroy those that already exist? How do theseinstitutions evolve once they have been established? This book answers these questions through spatial and temporal comparison of national and subnational cases from Botswana, Ghana, and Kenya and, to a lesser extent, Zimbabwe. Onoma argues that the level of property rights security that leaders prefer depends on how they use land. However, the extent to which leaders’ institutional preferences are translated into actual institutions depends on the level of leaders’ capacity. Further, once established, these institutions through their very working can contribute to their own decline over time. This book is unique in revealing the political and economic reasons why some leaders unlike others prefer an environment of insecure rights even as land prices increase.
The employment of autochthony discourses has become a prominent feature of contemporary politics around the world. Autochthony discourses link identity and space, enabling the speaker to establish a direct claim to territory by asserting that one is an original inhabitant, a ‘son of the soil’. Drawing from recent African examples, this contribution argues that the employment of autochthony discourses is an attractive response to the ontological uncertainty around political identities within the postmodern/postcolonial condition. Autochthony discourses can resonate deeply with populations longing for a sense of primal security in the face of uncertainty generated by a variety of sources, from the processes of contemporary globalisation to the collapse of neo-patrimonial structures. Yet this sense of security is inevitably fleeting, given the instability and plasticity of autochthony claims. The contribution examines why these discourses are often characterised by violence, and argues that autochthony is frequently linked to the desire for order inherent in contemporary state making, which invariably relies on multiple manifestations of violence.
Since the 1990s, the upsurge of multiple “sons-of-the-soil” conflicts all over the world has reopened academic debate about the rise of nativism, the role of ethnicity, and the alleged crisis of citizenship within the postcolonial state. Often the renewed claim for belonging versus exclusion under the vernacular of “autochthony” is seen as a reactionary attempt to counter the de-rooting of identity within the neoliberal globalizing context. This article makes the case that at the base of many homeland disputes lie too powerfully territorialized (ethnic) identities and the enduring but highly selective reaffirmation of such “natural” geo-cultural links —by both local political agents and state. In the Indian state of Assam, the struggle over indigenous homelands has not been a cry for closure within the engulfing globalizing world, but the result of sustained, yet ambivalent politics of identification, classification, and ethnographic mapping through which the colony and post-colony have sought to reshape the political landscape of India's Northeast. This selective but highly mobilizing politics of autochthony has not only extolled fierce struggle between “indigenous” and “fake autochthon” communities over the protection and demarcation of indigenous homeland, it has also engendered fierce conflict amongst autochthon groups about the degree of indigeneity required to claim a separate homeland of their own.
The recent upsurge of "autochthony" and similar notions of belonging is certainly not special to Africa. All over the world, processes of intensifying globalization seem to go together with fierce struggles over belonging and exclusion of "strangers." A central question in the contributions to this special issue concerns the apparent "naturalness" of autochthony in highly different settings. How can similar slogans seem so self-evident and hence have such mobilizing force under very different circumstances? Another recurrent theme is the somewhat surprising "nervousness" of discourses on autochthony. They seem to promise a basic security of being rooted in the soil as a primal form of belonging. Yet in practice, belonging turns out to be always relative: there is always the danger of being unmasked as "not really" belonging, or even of being a "fake" autochthon. A comparative perspective on autochthony—as a particular pregnant form of entrenchment—may help to unravel the paradoxes of the preoccupation with belonging in a globalizing world.
The recent wars in the DR Congo have led to a marked upsurge in both elite and popular discourse and violence around belonging and exclusion, expressed through the vernacular of “autochthony.” Dangerously flexible in its politics, nervous and paranoid in its language, unmoored from geographic or ethno-cultural specificity, borrowing energy both from present conflicts and deep-seated mythologies of the past, the idea of autochthony has permitted comparatively localized instances of violence in the DRC to inscribe themselves upward into regional, and even continental logics, with dangerous implications for the future. This article analyzes how the “local”/“stranger” duality of autochthony/allochthony expresses itself in the DRC through rumors, political tracts, and speeches and how it draws energy from imprecise overlaps with other powerful, preexisting identity polarities at particular scales of identity and difference: local, provincial, national, regional. Across each, autochthony operates as a loose qualifier, a binary operator: autochthony is adjectival, relational rather than absolute, policing a distinction between in and out, and yet not indicating, in itself, which in/ou t distinction is intended. Thus many speak of “Sons of the Soil,” but of which soil, precisely? The slipperiness between different scales of meaning permits the speaker to leave open multiple interpretations. This indefiniteness is a paradoxical source of the discourse's strength and weakness, suppleness and nervousness, its declarative mood and attendant paranoia.
Since the 1990s, the upsurge of multiple “sons-of-the-soil” conflicts all over the world has reopened academic debate about the rise of nativism, the role of ethnicity, and the alleged crisis of citizenship within the postcolonial state. Often the renewed claim for belonging versus exclusion under the vernacular of “autochthony” is seen as a reactionary attempt to counter the de-rooting of identity within the neoliberal globalizing context. This article makes the case that at the base of many homeland disputes lie too powerfully territorialized (ethnic) identities and the enduring but highly selective reaffirmation of such “natural” geo-cultural links —by both local political agents and state. In the Indian state of Assam, the struggle over indigenous homelands has not been a cry for closure within the engulfing globalizing world, but the result of sustained, yet ambivalent politics of identification, classification, and ethnographic mapping through which the colony and post-colony have sought to reshape the political landscape of India's Northeast. This selective but highly mobilizing politics of autochthony has not only extolled fierce struggle between “indigenous” and “fake autochthon” communities over the protection and demarcation of indigenous homeland, it has also engendered fierce conflict amongst autochthon groups about the degree of indigeneity required to claim a separate homeland of their own.
Although, as the name of the country suggests, Botswana is populated mainly by Tswana-speaking peoples, it is acknowledged that the most indigenous or aboriginal inhabitants of the country are the San or Basarwa, identified and described in some of the literature as Bushmen. Basarwa also have the less admirable distinction of being perceived and depicted as the most marginalized of all the ethnic groups in the country. Concern about the status, and the political and economic position of Basarwa in Botswana has been expressed in numerous reports and writings, official and unofficial, and at various conferences, seminars and gatherings, national or international.
Consider these apparently simple facts: in 1968, the Government of Botswana introduced its Tribal Land Act , which promulgated new institutional and tenurial arrangements for the rural communities; in the period thereafter land regulations in Barolong, a small chiefdom in the south-eastern corner of the country, underwent dramatic changes. Most obvious among these were a rapid rise in the value of cultivable acreages, a marked shift in the ideology of property rights, and an intense politicisation of the processes surrounding the distribution and negotiation of arable holdings. Given the historical coincidence of these events, it might seem perfectly reasonable to infer a causal link between them. And, indeed, the direct attribution of rural transformations of this kind to the effects of state intervention is common enough in analyses of “social change” and “development”. But, tempting as this mode of explanation might be, it leads inexorably to oversimplification. Worse still, it is often predicated upon the patently false assumption that the temporal conjunction of such decontextualised events may alone represent a sufficient condition for hypothesising causal connections between them.
striking aspect of recent developments in Africa is that democratization seems to trigger a general obsession with autochthony and ethnic citizenship invariably defined against “strangers”— that is, against all those who “do not really belong.” Thus political liberalization leads, somewhat paradoxically, to an intensification of the politics of belonging: fierce debates on who belongs where, violent exclusion of “strangers” (even if this refers to people with the same nationality who have lived for generations in the area), and a general affirmation of roots and origins as the basic criteria of citizenship and belonging. Such obsessions are all the more striking since historians and anthropologists used to qualify African societies as highly inclusive, marked by an emphasis on “wealth-in-people” (in contrast to Europe’s “wealth-in-things”) and a wide array of institutional mechanisms for including people (adoption, fosterage, the broad range of classificatory kinship terminology). In many African political formations, prior to liberalization there was an important social distinction between autochthons and allochthons, but its implications were strikingly different from today. Often rulers came from allochthon clans who emphasized their origin from elsewhere, yet had privileged access to political positions. Since the late 1980s, in contrast, autochthony has become a powerful slogan to exclude the Other, the allogène, the stranger. Political liberalization seems to have strengthened a decidedly nonliberal tendency towards closure and exclusion (cf. Bayart 1996).
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