Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa

Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa PDF Author: Carola Lentz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253009618
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
An ethnographic study of issues of land rights, property regimes, and ethnicity in West Africa. Focusing on an area of the savannah in northern Ghana and southwestern Burkina Faso, Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa explores how rural populations have secured, contested, and negotiated access to land and how they have organized their communities despite being constantly on the move as farmers or migrant laborers. Carola Lentz seeks to understand how those who claim native status hold sway over others who are perceived to have come later. As conflicts over land, agriculture, and labor have multiplied in Africa, Lentz shows how politics and power play decisive roles in determining access to scarce resources and in changing notions of who belongs and who is a stranger. “Illuminates the distinctive historical trajectory of land claims, authority, and belonging among the Dagara and Sisala peoples of the Black Volta region, and locates this specific case history within broader debates over transformation in access, use, and control over land in colonial and postcolonial Africa.” —Sara Berry, Johns Hopkins University “Important in the sense that it constitutes a detailed historical study of how complex narratives of belonging and notions of property interlock. . . . It is academic work of the first order.” —Christian Lund, Roskilde University

Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa

Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa PDF Author: Richard Kuba
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9047417038
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Recognizing that land rights are ambiguous, negotiable and politically embedded, these case studies explore the long-term processes and recent changes in contemporary rural West Africa affecting the conversion of control over land into social and political capital and vice versa. They point to the colonial origins of what came to be viewed as ‘customary’ tenure and to the legal pluralism characterizing pre-colonial tenure arrangements. Furthermore, they show the spiritual and ritual importance of land that can be converted into political power and economic prerogatives, a dimension neglected by much of the recent literature. Analyses cover forest and savannah, state and segmentary societies, facilitating comparison and insights across the Anglo-Francophone divide.

Power / Knowledge / Land

Power / Knowledge / Land PDF Author: Laura German
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047205533X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 349

Book Description
The 2008 outcry over the "global land grab" made headlines around the world, and has led to sustained interest among both academics and the international development establishment. In Power/Knowledge/Land, author Laura German profiles the consolidation of a global knowledge regime surrounding land and its governance within international development circles following the outcry over "global land grabs," and the growing enrollment of previously antagonistic actors within it. Drawing theoretical insights from ontological anthropology and decolonial theory and deploying pioneering analytical techniques inspired by the politics of knowledge, German reveals the inner mechanics of a global knowledge regime that has enabled the longstanding project of commodifying customary land to be advanced by capturing the energies of socially progressive forces. By bringing theories of change from the emergent land governance orthodoxy into dialogue with the ethnographic evidence from across the African continent and beyond, concepts masquerading as universal and self-evident truths are provincialized, and their role in commodifying customary land and entrenching colonial futurities put on display. In doing so, the volume brings wider academic debates surrounding productive forms of power into the heart of the land grab debate, while enhancing their accessibility to a wider audience. Power/Knowledge/Land takes current scholarly debates surrounding land grabs beyond their theoretical moorings in critical agrarian studies, political economy and globalization into contemporary debates surrounding the politics of knowledge--from decolonial theory to ontological anthropology, thereby enabling new dynamics of the phenomenon to be revealed. German also takes a deep look at global knowledge brokers and dynamics in international development, complementing a large body of scholarship on the political economy of land grabs and their situated agrarian dynamics. The book deploys a pioneering epistemology integrating deconstructionist tools of discourse analysis with comparative study and systematic qualitative reviews to hold dominant knowledge and truth claims surrounding theories of change in international development circles against the ethnographic evidence--from situated property relations and ontologies of land, to the impacts of land governance interventions. This helps to reveal the Western and modernist biases in the narratives that have been advanced about women, custom, and security, revealing how the coloniality of knowledge underpins political economies of land.

Slavery, Resistance, and Identity in Early Modern West Africa

Slavery, Resistance, and Identity in Early Modern West Africa PDF Author: Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009282328
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Book Description
Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more than fifteen million people were uprooted from West Africa and enslaved in the Trans-Saharan and Transatlantic slave systems The state of Gajaage, located on the West African hinterland, offered a doorway to the Atlantic Ocean and played a central role in the wide-scale trade system that connected the histories of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Focussing on the Soninke of Gajaaga, Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré demonstrates how their resistance to the slave trades led to the formation of a united community bound by an awareness of identity. This original study expands our understanding of the various modes of resistance West Africans employed to stem the encroaching tide of Arab imperializing efforts, European mercantile capitalism, and the Atlantic slave trade, whilst also highlighting how ethnic and religious identities were constructed and mobilized in the region.

Negotiating Access to Land in West Africa

Negotiating Access to Land in West Africa PDF Author: Philippe Lavigne Delville
Publisher: IIED
ISBN: 9781899825950
Category : Africa, West
Languages : en
Pages : 142

Book Description
Land tenure and Resource Access in West Africa Programme

Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa

Boundaries, Communities and State-Making in West Africa PDF Author: Paul Nugent
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020689
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 637

Book Description
By examining three centuries of history, this book shows how vital border regions have been in shaping states and social contracts.

Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola

Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola PDF Author: Mariana P. Candido
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009059955
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Exploring the multifaceted history of dispossession, consumption, and inequality in West Central Africa, Mariana P. Candido presents a bold revisionist history of Angola from the sixteenth century until the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Synthesising disparate strands of scholarship, including the histories of slavery, land tenure, and gender in West Central Africa, Candido makes a significant contribution to ongoing historical debates. She demonstrates how ideas about dominion and land rights eventually came to inform the appropriation and enslavement of free people and their labour. By centring the experiences of West Central Africans, and especially African women, this book challenges dominant historical narratives, and shows that securing property was a gendered process. Drawing attention to how archives obscure African forms of knowledge and normalize conquest, Candido interrogates simplistic interpretations of ownership and pushes for the decolonization of African history.

Integrating Strangers

Integrating Strangers PDF Author: Anaïs Ménard
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1800738404
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
Drawing on an ethnography of Sherbro coastal communities in Sierra Leone, this book analyses the politics and practice of identity through the lens of the reciprocal relations that exist between socio-ethnic groups. Anaïs Ménard examines the implications of the social arrangement that binds landlords and strangers in a frontier region, the Freetown Peninsula, characterized by high degrees of individual mobility and social interactions. She showcases the processes by which Sherbro identity emerged as a flexible category of practice, allowing individuals the possibility to claim multiple origins and perform ethnic crossovers while remaining Sherbro.

Spaces of Responsibility

Spaces of Responsibility PDF Author: Diana Ayeh
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110690233
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
Spaces of Responsibility explores the role of ethics in (re)ordering extractive relations under the global condition. Through an empirical investigation of actors, places, and ideas in and around Burkina Faso’s industrial gold mining sector, this volume carries out an anti-essentialist yet critical examination, offering new insights into global mining capitalism. Corporate concession-making practices, the implementation of (national) mining legislation, and civil society interventions in mining areas all contribute in different ways to the dialectics of the global. Accordingly, the ongoing territorialization of mining investment often has considerable impacts on the well-being of populations in the Global South. At the same time, multinational corporations today cannot completely distance or isolate themselves from the political, economic, and social contexts they are interacting in and with. Drawing on theoretical debates about the links between resource extraction and socio-economic development, multi-scalar negotiations of ethics in mining governance are ethnographically retraced. In terms of gains and benefits, these negotiations manifest themselves spatially, providing access for some actors while excluding others.

Africa. N.S. V/1, 2023.

Africa. N.S. V/1, 2023. PDF Author: Autori Vari
Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description
Articoli / Articles Patrick Y. Whang, “We pray that they should never win elections”: The Basutoland Congress Party as Opposition in the Late Colonial and Early Post-Independence Lesotho, 1960-1970 Federica Toldo, La danse de xinguilamento entre mise en scène patrimoniale et conceptions locales de la possession (Luanda, Angola) Pietro Repishti, Land for the People, Land for the Gods: Property and Appropriation of Urban Space in Porto-Novo between the 18th and 19th Century Carolina Domina, Kutuku: Anthropological Insights into the Nzema Gin Alessandra Brivio, Domestic Slavery and Domestic Work in the Gold Coast (Ghana): The Invisibility of Women’s Labour Recensioni / Reviews Nicola Camilleri, Staatsangehörigkeit und Rassismus. Rechtsdiskurse und Verwaltungspraxis in den Kolonien Eritrea und Deutsch-Ostafrika (Roberta Pergher) ‘History of Ashanti’ by Otumfuo, Nana Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, edited by T.C. McCaskie (Richard Rathbone) Arrigo Pallotti, La decolonizzazione dell’Africa australe. Il ruolo della Tanzania (1961-1980) (Giacomo Macola) Autori / Contributors