The tutorat relationship: an overview

Encouraged by colonial authorities, the settlement of migrants took place under a common customary institutional arrangement⁵: a patron-client-type relationship we refer to as tutorat, from the local French word tuteur. This term is commonly used to refer to the customary ‘landowners’ who, as first-comers (autochthons), concede land administration rights to migrant farmers, locally called ‘strangers’. The tutorat relationship only concerns long-term transfers of administration rights, especially on coffee or cocoa plantations. It does not concern renting, sharecropping and other short or middle-term transfers of land use rights.

The relationship of tutorat, which is commonly found in rural societies in Africa, is precisely an agrarian institutional device for regulating relationships between first-comers and late-comers. It fits into a moral economy principle that considers that any individual or group has a right of access to the means of subsistence for himself and his family. It is clearly in the name of this moral principle that autochthons, before the massive colonizing rush of the 1950s and 1960s, could not refuse ‘free’ access to land to strangers. The delegation of administration rights on a plot of land by the tuteur is inseparable from the stranger's social incorporation in the local community. In turn, the status-based incorporation of the ‘good strangers’ reinforces the host community politically and economically (Jacob Reference Colin, Kouamé and Soro2007). This incorporation, in the pre-colonial period, took place according to what Shack calls, in a Simmelian sense, the liminal status of the strangers – marginal as well as integral, depending on ritual processes and on the rules governing first-comer and late-comer encounters, in various domains of activity in which they interact (Barth Reference Barth and Barth1969; Shack Reference Shack, Shack and Skinner1979).

In time, and through the effects of a range of political, economic and social factors, the extent of the rights conceded by tuteurs and the corresponding obligations of ‘their strangers’ has varied. In many cases, such delegation of administration rights verges on, and hides, largely monetarized transfers of possession rights. However, the monetarization of the tutorat relationship does not erase the social obligation stemming from the ‘gratitude’ that the migrant (or his heirs) owes to his tuteur (or to the latter's heirs) and, more generally, to the indigenous community where he and his offspring live. The tutorat relationship endures through the passing of generations. The settlers or their heirs are always able to designate the autochthonous individual or family who granted initial access to land, even in the case of subsequent land sales among strangers. When the original tuteur dies, his heir takes over the deceased tuteur’s role. In the event that the stranger-guest dies first, the tuteur re-actualizes the relation by ceremonially installing the former's heir (who must then ‘go’ [introduce himself] to the tuteur if he did not previously live on that land).

A key point to underline is that the land resource and the socio-political dimensions of the tutorat relationship are intimately entangled: as a social institution, the tutorat regulates both the transfer of land rights and the political incorporation of the strangers in the local community.

We will organize the discussion of these two dimensions of embeddedness and their interactions in the context of centre-west Côte d'Ivoire following the main historical phases since the 1950s.

The roots of monetarized transfers in the frame of the tutorat relationship

At the end of the 1940s, when a new flow of (especially Bawle) migrants arrived, the plantations amongst the Gban and Guro autochthons generally belonged to ‘big men’, district and village head men whose close links to colonial authorities gave them access to forced labour. The new influx of migrants was encouraged by the RDA (Rassemblement Démocratique Africain) party and more particularly by its Bawle leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny. The Bawles settled first on Guro land, then on Gban land, asking local big men for land within the framework of the customary tutorat. However, when the first plantations began to produce around the mid-1950s, tuteurs asked for substantial fees (redevances foncières) in addition to the ‘duty of gratitude’ owed by Bawle migrant farmers.⁶

The issue took on several aspects, directly linked with the definition of property rights within the autochthonous community. First, a new situation had developed in which land use generated an appreciable monetary surplus for the strangers. The customary principle according to which one cannot refuse free access to land to a stranger in search of a means of subsistence became inappropriate for the autochthonous tuteurs. Thus the tuteurs’ claim for land fees can be seen as an adaptation of the tutorat relationship to a context of commoditization. It was encouraged by the conciliatory position of the colonial administration, concerned with the autochthons’ demands. At that time the colonial administration was indeed moving towards a stronger recognition of customary rights (1955 and 1956 decrees). It was opposed by the RDA party, which was the key actor in the move towards the colony's internal autonomyFootnote ⁷ (see below).

Second, to whom and how should this compensation be given within the local community? As district and village headmen expressed fears of becoming politically dependent on the more numerous strangers and therefore became less willing to cede land to new migrants, the Bawle migrants bypassed them and gained access to land by directly negotiating with the heads of smaller family groups. In Raulin's study (1957), as well as in the files of the sous-préfecture of Oumé (Bonnecase Reference Bonnecase2001), it is clear that in the 1950s the control of land transfers to new migrants was of such value that it gave rise to confrontations between local big men and heads of ordinary extended families. The former tried to monopolize the right to transfer land rights to strangers and the corresponding privilege of collecting the relevant fees. Finally, the latter successfully denied the big men had any political or religious authority to allocate rights involving their own forest reserves.

Third, what form should the migrants’ obligatory expression of gratitude take? The chiefs and lineage elders sought to define new rules on the nature and methods of making the migrants pay for land access, in addition to the tokens of gratitude that the migrant owed to his tuteur. Autochthons seemed then to favour payment of a type of monetary lump sum, independent of the size of area allocated to the migrants, as a mark of strangers’ agreement to give political allegiance to the tuteurs’ communities. On the other side, the Bawle migrants ‘claimed the possibility of acquiring [land] definitively after some type of probationary stage’ (Raulin Reference Raulin1957: 58) – in other words, through a temporary tutorat relationship.

The time of independence: monetary transfers under political control

The Bawles’ protests against the ever-increasing land fees under the cover of the tutorat relationship were supported, under the banner of PDCI-RDA (Parti Démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire-RDA), by the emerging Ivorian political elite, a good many of whom had vested interests in large coffee or cocoa farms located outside their home region. A key economic and political goal at independence was the expansion of the western agricultural frontier, a goal whose achievement was to be hastened by loosening the autochthons’ claims over the settlers. This was clearly the case in the Oumé region, then one of the most important sites of new planting.

At independence, Houphouët's PDCI won complete political hegemony. It was thus in a position to ignore the colonial 1955 and 1956 decrees which could have led to the recognition of autochthonous rights, and provided a means to address a critical political issue: the strong political embeddedness of the distinction between first-comers and late-comers and its implication for the politics of belonging within local communities. However, as a typical ‘peasant state’,Footnote ⁸ despite the PDCI's hegemony the newly independent country faced the major constraint of structural limitations on its ability to anchor its authority, legitimacy and means of action in local micro-politics. Effective ‘peasant state’ governance exercises hegemony on a shoestring (in Sara Berry's terms): it depends on the control, by the state, of intermediaries who themselves emerge from local peasant societies and provide the link between central authority and local farming communities. In this context, state intervention in the tutorat relationship and the tuteurs’ assertion of their right to collect monetary fees put at risk the local political anchorage of the state itself. The alleviation of the autochthons’ claims over the migrants and the political protection of the latter could not be based solely on coercion. The cost and weight of such coercion would have greatly outstripped the means available and the result might have been politically counter-productive.

Consequently, the really decisive interventions on the part of the government and the ruling elite in order to open the western forest belt to settlers did not rely on the implementation of official development plans or legal mechanisms, but on a range of other interventions of a fundamentally political and clientelistic nature whose aim was to delegitimize the systematic monetarization of the land transfers. The alleged under-settlement of the Gban forest and the weak development of the available forest resources were used to justify welcoming brothers in need of land. The moral and cultural reference to the tutorat made by the administrative authorities was accompanied by instructions which aimed at closely framing and de-monetarizing its implementation. These instructions (political pressure applied to village authorities to welcome strangers, protection of the latter in case of conflicts) were grounded in the order issued by Houphouet-Boigny himself in 1963: ‘la terre appartient à celui qui la met en valeur’ (‘the land belongs to those who develop it’). This dictum assumed the force of law, though it completely contradicted the provisions of legislation inherited from the colonial period, and formally forbade the imposition of land fees on the settlers. For the rest, the new independent state left the practical arrangements regarding the transfer of land rights to the increasing number of migrants largely in the hands of its local political brokers, thus relying on the micro-politics prevailing inside the local multiethnic communities.

From the 1960s to the 1980s: disconnecting the land resource dimensions of monetary land transfers from the socio-political dimension of tutorat

From independence, then, the informal state policyFootnote ⁹ for controlling the transfer of land rights to migrants took the form of an intermingling of persuasion, coercion, incentives and redistributive clientelism, in accordance with the peasant state style of governance. Positive incentives played a role in the acceptance of the migrants’ settlement by individual tuteurs. The state pressure in favour of the settlement of strangers brought about dissimulated (non-rebellious) strategies deployed by tuteurs in order to circumvent the state's informal regulation of the tutorat and to take some advantage of this situation. The ‘obligation of gratitude’ of the settled migrants provided them with substantial advantages, like larger and more regular cash payments.Footnote ¹⁰ In particular, through their relation of tutorat with autochthonous elders, strangers indirectly supplied a growing part of the schooling and urban migration expenditures of autochthonous youth. As long as land availability allowed the settlement of new migrants, these strategies favoured the segmentation of land control within the extended families and the reinforcement of the bilateral embeddedness of land transfers between tuteurs and strangers, to the detriment of the broader integrity of local political authority at the village level. That is, respect for, and allegiance to, the village as a self-governing polity was undermined by clientelism and corruption among local chiefs, civil servants and politicians in the settlement of conflicts between tuteurs and strangers, and by the pressure exerted on the village and family authorities to convince recalcitrant autochthons to transfer land rights to migrants.

Progressively, the Gban tuteurs circumvented the state's prohibition of land fees by incorporating an increasing monetary component in the initial symbolic gifts that sanctioned the stranger's access to land, and by increasing and monetizing their demands regarding the strangers’ subsequent duty of gratitude. That, however, gave rise to competing interpretations concerning the bundle of rights effectively transferred to the settlers. On the one hand, the generalization of transfers of land rights to settlers gradually transformed them into clients, henceforth subject to illegal and clandestine land fees, legitimized by moral obligations. Yet, on the other hand, the tendency to increase and monetize social obligations in return for transfer of a broad bundle of rights encouraged the idea among the settlers – particularly Ivorian settlers – of having been engaged in a purchase–sale transaction. But in the autochthons’ perspective, in no way could the transaction cancel the moral, political and material obligations of gratitude that the settler (or his heirs) owes to his Gban tuteur (or his heirs) – even if the Gbans themselves often used the term ‘sale’ to qualify these transfers.

Despite these competing interpretations and some localized tensions, the advantages (even if very unequally divided) that came with economic growth from the 1960s (due in particular to the agricultural colonization of the country's central-western and western forests) were a major reason for autochthons and other stakeholders to submit to the government policy of agricultural colonization under the guise of an increasingly monetarized relation of tutorat. The ‘Ivorian miracle’ gave the state the means to guarantee fixed prices to farmers, to subsidize imports, and to improve the general standard of living. However, in return, the government expected farmers to submit politically, and allow legitimacy to the state party and its local agents’ interference in land matters. This informal pact also included specific compromises between the state party and the Ivorian and non-Ivorian immigrants, including protected access to land in exchange for electoral support (non-Ivorian residents were authorized to vote up to 1990). The compromise also concerned autochthonous young people, whose land access was threatened by monetarized land transfers to settlers. Their support was gained through free schooling, access to urban employment and – at least in theory – assistance once they wished to establish themselves as ‘modern farmers’.

Since the mid-1980s: vernacular formalization versus the conflictual reconnection with the socio-political dimension of land transfer

Over the last twenty years, repeated economic, social and political crises have exhausted the basis of the socio-political compromise which underpinned the transfer of land rights to strangers, combining monetarized transactions and moral, political and material obligations of gratitude. In particular, the urban economic crisis and the failure of the model for social progress based on education and urban migration has resulted in a significant return of townspeople, especially unemployed young people, to their home villages (Beauchemin Reference Beauchemin2001), at the very time when the decrease in cocoa prices and effects of liberalization policy have made local elders more dependent on the rent they are able to extract from the tutorat relationship with settlers. The youngsters or townsmen returning to the village exert strong pressure on their family head to recover a portion of the land transferred to migrants, with some of them even trying to intimidate settlers and regain plots by force. Over these last twenty disturbed years, structural tensions within autochthonous families have increased and focused on the distribution, by the family head, of the income from transfers of land to strangers, particularly in order to fund farming, local off-farm activities and young family members’ urban migrations (some young people try to finance their urban migration and, nowadays, their migration to Europe, through the clandestine sale of portions of forest situated far from the village, and even through the sale of family plantations).

Tensions within the tuteurs’ families in turn fed tensions with the beneficiaries of past transfers, or their heirs. In the past, the bundle of rights delegated to the strangers was broad and approximated a sale in the classical sense, subject to manifestations of respect and gratitude. Today, under pressure from family members, this bundle is considered as exceeding customary norms regarding the delegation of rights on ‘ancestral land’. More specifically, strangers’ rights to transfer land through inter vivo gifts, inheritance or saleFootnote ¹¹ (which in the past just required notification to the tuteur) are now disputed. In these conditions, the death of the initial tuteur or settler often favours a renegotiation by the tuteur's heir of the conditions of transfer or a reaffirmation of the tutorat relation regarding the settler's heir. This often involves the autochthon's demand for an additional financial compensation. The argument generally used then, especially by young autochthons, is that the price paid by the stranger at the time of the initial land transfer was so low that it did not correspond to a purchase price and that this allowed the stranger to get richer at the expense of his tuteur's family.

In order to try to secure their rights, the ‘buyers’ often asked for written receipts attesting the transfers. Such receipts are locally designated as papier (paper), reçu (receipt), convention de vente (sale convention), accord de concession (concessionary agreement) or just convention (see, for example, Koné 2002). This practice already existed but became widespread in the 1980s. This ‘vernacular formalization’ concerns primarily the land resource dimensions of customary land transfers and, principally, the bilateral monetary convention of the transfer between the tuteur and the stranger. However, the transferred rights and duties remain largely unspecified in the papiers, especially regarding both the content of the rights, the compensation expected from the migrant, or the buyers’ and sellers’ legitimacy.Footnote ¹² In particular, they never mention the duty of gratitude (in its different potential manifestations) owed to the tuteurs. Concretely, the vernacular formalization of land transfers did not prevent the intervention of autochthonous family members in the relationships between tuteurs and strangers, nor the expectation of the buyers’ duty of gratitude. Even if this duty is not mentioned in the papiers, there is no doubt that its respect by the buyer remains a strong guarantee of the legitimacy of the past transfer from the perspective of the tuteur's family and, more generally, of the autochthonous community. In other words, this ‘informal formalization’ of the land resource dimensions of the transfers does not insulate the buyer from autochthonous intra-family and intra-community hazards, although it provides the buyer with some evidence of his possession regarding any legal procedure. The existence of papiers may play a role in the perception of local (administrative and village) authorities, in case of conflict – such as manifest abuses by tuteurs’ family members. But, at the village level and through time, the enforcement of strangers’ administration rights remains conditioned by the fact that the strangers ‘consider’ their tuteur, his family and the whole autochthonous community – in other words, that they adequately (according to local norms) help them to overcome the difficulties they may face and that they contribute to the village's development and main social events.

The reinforcement of the family embeddedness of land transfers and the perpetuation of the strangers’ duty of gratitude, despite the spread of the vernacular formalization, contributed to the generalization of an ambiguous or composite perception of the situation among the actors themselves. On the one hand, the monetarization of land access is generalized, but on the other hand, the security of the transactions always remains subject to clientelist relations. To paraphrase Durkheim, the social non-contractual conditions of the (sale) contract are, in this context, an implicit but integral part of the contract, its negotiation and enforcement through time. For the buyer, the connection between his access to land through a monetary payment and his political incorporation in the autochthonous local polity (vis-à-vis the political dimension of land transfers) is, at least potentially, always at stake.

The culmination of the economic and political crisis since the end of the 1990s, with the voting of the new land law in 1998 and the December 1999 coup against the PDCI state, favoured the politicization of the land question at both the regional Gban and national levels. Land transfers benefiting outsiders are now stigmatized on political and ethnic grounds. References to autochthony and the protection of ‘traditional’ land rights have become an increasingly effective electoral argument. The complaints now addressed towards Burkinabes, Dyulas and Bawles are the same that were addressed towards the Bawle settlers some decades ago. They express, especially during the current civil conflict, the autochthonous perception of a transgression of the principles associated with the socio-political incorporation of the strangers induced by land transfers, monetarized or not: the strangers have become richer and richer, whereas local families are struggling; they invest at home the money they earn locally; they show no interest in village affairs; they no longer respect their duty of gratitude towards the local community; the Ivorian strangers do not vote for the autochthons’ candidates and their numerical importance gives them a political advantage – and so on.

In summary, the monetary dimension of land transfers and their vernacular formalization have strengthened since the mid-1980s. However, this process did not diminish the family, community and political aspects of their social embeddedness but rather came about in parallel with the conflictual reactivation of this embeddedness.

Migrants' initial access to land outside the autochthon–migrant relationship

The first newcomer in the area under study was A. K., an Abure who settled around 1915. Some Bawles and Anyis,Footnote ¹⁴ mainly, but also some Gbans, Yacoubas and Nzimas started to arrive in the 1920s at a time when the smallholder plantation economy was starting to develop in Côte d'Ivoire. A. K. settled the first newcomers in various parts of the forest – ‘settled’ in the sense of pointing out the place where they could start clearing the forest and indicating a vague direction to these clearings. Subsequently, these first pioneers, then recognized as ‘regulators’ of access to the land, in turn settled in their respective sectors the migrants who kept arriving. Access to land rested therefore on two shared principles, which legitimized and regulated the land control and the organization of the settlements: (1) the principle that the anteriority in the arrival creates a legitimacy to regulate the settlement of newcomers; and (2) the principle, commonly found in African contexts, that labour creates the right to land: the clearing of the forest was sufficient to ensure one's uncontested individual right over the land.

The fact that the ‘regulators’ were acknowledged as those organizing the settlement did not give them rights over the land cleared by newcomers. They just received the usual bottle of gin, or some litres of bangui (palm wine). One does not find here the precedence in arrival as establishing a power relation, a hierarchy then inherited by the first-comers’ heirs. All the old pioneers interviewed in the early 1980s said that when they first arrived, ‘the land belonged to nobody’. By this, they meant that the Anyis from Sanwi or the Eotiles were living far away, that there was no Anyi or Eotile village claiming these lands. Nevertheless, they knew that they were in Anyi-Sanwi/Eotile country. In our interpretation, this element, combined with the diverse origin of the first migrants, would have radically inhibited any pretension of the first settlers to install an earth shrine and claim on such a ground a control over land.

We see the lack of socially legitimized right over the uncleared forest – the absence of an allodial right which could be invoked to justify a claim – as explaining why one does not find, in this situation, access to land through the tutorat institution: there were no autochthonous hosts, and the first settlers did not turn later into tuteurs regarding newcomers. That Djimini has no specific land regulation authority (there is no chef de terre, no collective rituals provided by the descendants of the first settlers) can be traced to this specific social and historical context of the pioneer phase of smallholder plantation economy.

Outright sales

With the end of the pioneer phase, access to land under the conditions that have just been described no longer operated. From then on, access to land property came from inheritance, inter vivo donations or purchase. The land market operated significantly in Djimini, where one third of the total acreage of all land estates has been the object of at least one transaction. The development of land transactions led to modifications of the ethnic balance in land control, numerous purchasers being Malinkes and Senoufos from northern Côte d'Ivoire, Mali and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso).

The first transactions related to plantations in production. Originally, the land dimension of transactions was thus a by-product of acquiring plantations: ‘Before, we used to buy the plantations, not the land’, declared the planters interviewed in the 1980s. Land was then in abundant supply and was not yet considered to have an exchange value. Thereafter, from the 1960s, it was the land itself that acquired a market value, with the sale of plots that were fallow or bearing old, unproductive, plantations. In all cases, transactions related to land on which the seller had socially well-established rights of ownership, even if they were not legally recognized.

The fact that Djimini was an immigrant village facilitated the constitution of a land market on two accounts: most pioneers could manage their land patrimonies as they wished because these had not been acquired through customary inheritance, and the return of pioneers to their native village prompted the supply of land on the market. Most land was indeed sold by planters leaving the village to go back home, or by planters’ heirs unwilling to settle in Djimini. The former no man's land character of this area also influenced the content of the transactions. In contrast to what is usually observed in the centre-west, land sales in Djimini can be regarded as complete, as the transaction does not fall in any shape or form within the tutorat framework. The transaction corresponds to a transfer of the whole bundle of rights on the land, to an outright sale. In the local context, the fact that the purchaser is discharged from any obligation with respect to the seller is self-evident to all. Furthermore, no trace can be found of any cultural or religious resistance to land commoditization. This commoditization also appears in the development of a lease market, induced by the introduction of pineapple cultivation and the arrival of new waves of migrants from Burkina Faso (Colin Reference Colin2004; Colin and Ayouz Reference Colin and Ayouz2006; see also Kouamé’s contribution to this issue).

We saw that in the centre-west region, the rights transferred by autochthons to migrants through a monetary transaction remained largely open to the frequent contestations of land transactions when the seller considered that the buyer did not fulfil the duty of gratitude. The contrast with Djimini is striking: there, the questioning of past transactions remains exceptional (only one case over 68 sales), even in the current socio-political and legal context. The absence of an autochthonous claim on the land and the outright character of sales of land largely explain why land ownership rights obtained through monetarized transactions are not questioned.

The reassertion of social embeddedness

In Djimini, the concept of land sales in the common use of the term clearly makes sense. However, two elements reveal the immanence of an embeddedness of land transactions, on both the land resource and the socio-political dimensions – beyond the Granoveterian embeddedness, and beyond the irreducible embeddedness of any market transaction regarding the cognitive, cultural and social constructions of objects of exchange and norms of exchange. First, the safety-net function of land ownership in precarious environments, with the aim of safeguarding the family interest, highlights the role of social constraints on the formation of supply on the land market. The land market in Djimini was very active, but short-lived. With the passing of the generations, the pioneer's individual and private land control (resulting in the possibility to sell) was usually transformed through inheritance into family ownership. The same applies to land acquired on the market, whereby the purchasers’ personal property, at their death, tends to be transformed into family property. This helps to explain the almost total closure of the land market over recent decades, whereas there had been a large number of transactions between 1965 and 1975. The ever-stronger perceptions of increasing land scarcity in southern Côte d'Ivoire, and of limited employment opportunities outside agriculture for family members having use rights on the family land, represent a very real obstacle to land sales.

Second, the only case of contestation of a land sale reveals the latent socio-political dimension of land transactions. Thirty years ago, a Bawle planter sold his plantation to a Burkinabe. In 2001, the seller's son, a retired worker, returned to Djimini and asked the purchaser's heir to sell him back the land at purchase price. The heir refused and the case was taken to the court of Aboisso, before being referred to the court of Abidjan where it was still under investigation. It is, of course, not a trivial matter that the claim was formulated after the vote of the 1998 land law and in a socio-political context that was already tense at that time. The Ivorian landowners in Djimini express two positions with regard to such a case. When a foreigner acquired his land in Djimini by the clearing of the forest, or inheritance on clearing, or by purchase from a foreigner who had himself gained access to the land by being settled by one of the ‘regulators’, the idea that one may dispute the current owner's right is not considered to be legitimate – a position which goes back to the absence of an indigenous land stake in this context. On the other hand, when a foreigner acquired the land from an Ivorian, the eventuality of a recourse of the seller's children to recover the land is seen to be legitimate. The argument is based on a clear principle: the family should be able to exercise control over the land sale, in a context where the land represents a highly valuable asset and a key resource for the family needs. According to this principle, a sale completed by a relative can be legitimately disputed. In other words, it is not the commoditization of the land as such which is the subject of the dispute – as we saw, the principle according to which land can be sold is never questioned. It is again an intra-family dimension of the land question that emerges: ‘my father should not have sold the land; the family needs it, therefore we can legitimately dispute this sale’. At the same time, the conditions for effective application of this principle are shaped (1) by the prevailing legal and socio-political context, the legitimacy principle of challenge of sales being expressed vis-à-vis Burkinabe purchasers and not vis-à-vis Ivorian ones; and (2) by the fact that most land has been sold by pioneers going back home without leaving family members in Djimini, which de facto reduces the risk of such claims being presented effectively.

In a way, the Djimini case provides the exception that confirms the rule: the lack of embeddedness of land transactions in the absence of tutorat relationships. However, these market transactions, even if complete, still bear clear social dimensions through the social determinants of the participation in the market and through the socio-political consequences of the land transfers regarding the place of the purchasers in the local society.