Introduction

As in other countries in Africa, there are two parallel and competing histories of land tenure in Uganda. The indigenous systems evolved to suit the needs of different local groups, or at least certain elite members in those groups, in a variety of different ecological and economic circumstances. They worked on rules which have never been written down, making it easy for outsiders to consider all these systems as ‘customary tenure’ a single, unchanging system of rules and administration. Another, written, history began with British colonialism. The British introduced a system of freehold title under which client chiefs and kingdoms (as well as missions) were granted formal land rights. All land which was not registered was considered by the British to be ‘crown land’. Although customary tenure continued to operate on this land, the customary owners had little protection from the arbitrary expropriation of their property. The British colonial administrators regarded customary ownership as backward and a constraint to economic development, which by the 1950s they intended to replace with the ‘modern’ system of freehold. However, colonialism ended before this could be implemented.

On independence in 1962, crown land became public land, which made little difference to most people. The old colonial opinions on the primitiveness of customary tenure were deeply engrained (and remain so today, as we shall see). As a result, Uganda, like many other newly independent countries, experimented with nationalizing land, another way of trying to replace the ‘backwardness’ of customary tenure with a ‘modern’ system. This was supposed to allow for more ‘rational’ allocation of land. Still, the customary tenure systems continued to operate, though without legal status. From 1975, with the Land Reform Decree, land owners were effectively merely the occupiers of their land, which they held ‘under sufferance’ – meaning that possession of their land could be taken by the government whenever it wanted. Some land was indeed taken and given on leasehold to people who would now be termed ‘investors’ – in practice often civil servants, businessmen or those with political connections. The real ‘owners’ of the land had no rights at all.

More recently, nationalization of land and other natural resources went out of favour in Uganda as in the rest of the world, and the ‘backwardness’ of customary tenure is instead now contrasted with the assumed superiority of private individual freehold.