Introduction

As we have seen in earlier chapters, land claims are often tightly wrapped in questions of authority and the politics of jurisdiction. Few land issues are not also in some way issues of authority. For this chapter, however, emphasis differs as attention is primarily paid to two aspects of everyday struggles over property. First, the chapter demonstrates the relative inconclusiveness and renegotiability of the question of landed property in and around Bolga, as well as the imaginative strategies employed to secure land rights in the area. It shows how political-legal questions about property are negotiated and fought over outside the formal legal arenas. Second, the cases demonstrate people's simultaneous contrasting efforts to curb the negotiability. It shows how important it is to create “established facts,” however varied.

Contrary to Western legal thought, claims in a rural African context are not forfeited merely because they are delayed. In her work on the Chagga in Tanzania, Sally Falk Moore (1992: 29) points out how such claims rarely perish: