The developments of agricultural pioneer fronts, transhumance patterns, trade networks, clandestine flows, and migratory practices have contributed to depictions of Africa as a mobile continent. They have also challenged the very meaning of place and belonging. In a context of pronounced mobility, who can legitimately claim to be autochthonous? On what grounds should property rights be institutionalized? And how can spatially dispersed communities maintain social cohesion? Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa addresses these issues in a masterly way. Building on the case of two agrarian societies in the Black Volta region, anthropologist Carola Lentz details how the tension that exists between the imperatives of mobility and the need for stable access to land constitutes a powerful driver of social change.
The book starts with a detailed analysis of migration-and-settlement narratives, which typically describe how a group of hunters or farmers migrated in search of a new settlement. Several attempts and various encounters with animals and earth deities are usually necessary before the group reaches a suitable uninhabited area. The clearance of the bush is then used to exercise legitimate rights over land and membership in the local community vis-à-vis more recent immigrants. Examining the history of agricultural expansion from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century between northern Ghana and southwestern Burkina Faso, Lentz describes how settlement and property rights arise from the continuous struggle over first-comer status and how such rights can be converted into access to land resources, which, subsequently, may lead to political authority.
This richly researched book contains a number of crucial findings pertaining to the spatiality of West African agrarian societies. Reconstructing the historical migration of Sisala and Dagara farmers, Lentz emphasizes that, whatever the complexity of migration patterns, land ownership is a symbol of belonging for lineages scattered across the region. She also demonstrates that the occupation of different ecological niches leads to differences in the ethos and pattern of mobility; while the first-comer Sisala have developed an explicit ideology of stability and sedentariness, latecomer Dagara present themselves as frontiersmen. The translocal communities developed by the Dagara appear well-suited to the uncertainties faced by West African agriculturalists. Known as patriclan systems, these descent groups without a named ancestor are flexible enough to allow Dagara to travel over great distances and still find someone to whom they are related.
The book also makes an important contribution to the study of political and religious power. Focusing on ritual power, Lentz explains that earth shrines were used to secure property rights regarding land and other natural resources in addition to providing spiritual protection and fertility. The author shows that earth priests responsible for rituals and earth shrines played an important role in the struggle over economic interests and political privileges. The book details how earth shrines accompanying the migration of agriculturalists could be abandoned, restored, and used as spatial boundaries and how claims to land ownership have gradually been translated into entitlements, challenging the notion that African societies are indifferent to territorialisation and property.
The longue durée perspective adopted by the author appears particularly well adapted to the understanding of how agrarian societies migrate, how they maintain social relations and property claims over time and space, and how they deal with the actions of the state. Building on a number of colonial and postcolonial examples, the author demonstrates how property rights have been continuously contested in the savannah of the Black Volta region. Numerous examples of land conflicts from Burkina Faso and Ghana illustrate this point: as long as land remains a symbol of belonging and as long as the state is unable to guarantee property rights, land disputes are likely to remain inconclusive. Lentz argues that the colonial period actually reduced the recourse to small-scale warfare in the appropriation of new territories and led to an increasing ethnicization of property rights, which was hardly challenged by postcolonial regimes. Today, in a context characterized by a plurality of land legislations and institutions, the securitization of property rights and access to land resources relies heavily on a sustained investment in social networks and political alliances.
Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa presents a synthesis of the research conducted by the author in the last twenty years. The book is based on almost 200 interviews conducted with West African farmers in Dagara and Sisala villages, and supplemented with an analysis of the spatial distribution of settlements and lineages segments. More than 15 maps greatly help illuminate the complexity of migration patterns in the region. The book makes a remarkable contribution to the growing literature on mobility in Africa. Its emphasis on both the social and spatial strategies of West African agriculturalists makes it a highly recommended read for scholars and policymakers dealing with migration, mobility, resource management, and land conflict resolution in West Africa.
