The idea of the state in sub-Saharan Africa as ‘institutionless’ underlies much contemporary theorising about African politics (Chapter 1, this volume). The term ‘neo-patrimonialism’ – widely employed in the comparative politics literature to describe African political systems – implies a lack of institutionalisation, and the centralisation of power in the hands of a supreme ruler and government through personalised, shifting networks. The counterpart of this idea is an ‘institutionless’ conceptualisation of society, and most importantly perhaps, of rural society, which accounts for 50–90 per cent of the total population of almost all African states. Once ‘institutionless Africa’ is accepted as descriptive of both state and society, both state and social structure fall out of the explanatory equation. Almost by definition, politics revolve around networks, identities, informalism, and trust and distrust.

This chapter reverses this image of structureless states and societies. It focuses on rural land tenure institutions and argues that they are the product of institution-building strategies of Africa's modern rulers, both colonial and postcolonial, extending the argument laid out in Boone (2014). Africa's rulers are seen here as strategic actors who have sought to impose political order in the countryside in order to govern, and to remain in power. As strategic actors, they have been subject to the disciplines of rule and revenue, power and resistance, and cost and benefit – both political and economic. Like all rulers, rulers in Africa have been constrained and incentivised to seek compliance from subjects and citizens, to build institutions to lower the costs of securing acquiescence, and to enhance the predictability of rule. They have pursued institution-building and state-building strategies that are shaped by the societies they seek to govern. Contemporary land tenure institutions are one outcome of this process.

The analysis of land institutions builds on strands of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) that have been influential in comparative politics since the 1990s. The first part of the chapter defines land tenure institutions as property institutions, arguing that they can be viewed in the abstract as outcomes of strategic interaction (asymmetrical bargaining) between rulers and rural societies. The second part uses this model to theorise about institutional origins, variations, and change in land tenure institutions in sub-Saharan Africa.

Debates and conflicts over land rights have played a powerful role in some of the continent's most closely studied experiments with political liberalization – including those in Kenya in the 1990s, Côte d’Ivoire since the mid-1990s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zimbabwe, and Rwanda (1990–1994). In Kenya in 1992 and 1997, the incumbent regime of Daniel arap Moi stoked land tensions in the Rift Valley to consolidate its electoral constituencies, disorganize the opposition, and help strengthen the ruling party's hold on power. In Côte d’Ivoire since the mid-1990s, national-level politicians have catered to southwesterners’ land grievances against immigrant farmers in order to mobilize the electoral support of “true Ivoirians” in this region. In Zaire, Mobutu's National Conference in 1991 opened the door for politicians in eastern provinces to mobilize electoral constituencies around promises of land restitution. In Zimbabwe from the mid-1990s on, Mugabe played the land issue to the hilt to bolster his nationalist and populist credentials, cement his hold on an electoral base, and destroy the opposition. In Rwanda, too, an ongoing history of the use of state power to impose, allocate, and reallocate land rights shaped patterns of political mobilization in the period of multiparty politics from 1991 through April 1994.

The Kisii region of western Kenya has one of the highest rural population densities in all sub-Saharan Africa. Landholdings were consolidated under the control of Gusii lineage heads during the colonial state-formation period of the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1960s, the government broke up the clan-based or lineage holdings and registered land in the names of patriarchs who presided over extended families composed of their wives (often two or three), children, and grandchildren. During the next five decades, Gusii elders divided the original landholdings (often 40–50 acres in size) among their sons who have, by now, subdivided the land again. In this region of Kenya, the land frontier is closed. High population growth rates, combined with the low rates of increase in off-farm and national employment opportunities, have placed “overwhelming population pressure on the land.”

This is a region experiencing classic “agricultural involution” as described by Clifford Geertz: rates of increase in the productivity of labor are falling as families invest more and more labor for declining returns on ever-shrinking land parcels. Kisii is an example of a neocustomary land tenure regime (LTR) centered on lineage- or family-based authority over land, in a situation of acute land scarcity and high ethnic homogeneity. In these respects, it is similar to areas featured in some of the best-known studies in the African land-politics literature, including Kojo Amanor's (1999) studies of Akim region of Ghana, Pauline Peters's study of southern Malawi (2004), André and Platteau on northwest Rwanda (1998), Fiona MacKenzie on Meru (1998), and a long tradition of work on Kenya's Central Province (Berman and Lonsdale 1992, for example).

In Zimbabwe, a statist land tenure regime (LTR) produced land-related conflict that was, in many ways, isomorphic to the land conflicts observed in the cases considered in Chapter 9. The 1970s war of national liberation was undertaken in part to “reclaim and redistribute the land.” It can be taken as an episode of land-related conflict that squares with our expectations about how statist LTRs structure land-related conflict. More recently, during 2000–2005, the invasion, takeover, and expropriation of almost 4,000 white-owned commercial farms (under the so-called Fast Track land reform program) is an episode of politicized land conflict that also squares with our predictions about how and why statist land tenure regimes can bring land conflict straight into the electoral arena. As in the cases examined in Chapter 9, the analysis of Zimbabwe concentrates on explaining the form of land-related conflict, defined in terms of the axis of competition, scale and scope of conflict, ethnicity effects, winners’ and losers’ political options, mobilizing structures, and how the government will align in a land conflict framed in “indigenes versus settlers” terms. In this case, the conflict was framed by the Mugabe government as pitting indigenous (African) Zimbabweans against white settlers.

Mahmood Mamdani describes African states as “bifurcated states” that institutionalized two different modes of state-society relations: a civic, republican mode for the urban areas, and an authoritarian, nonliberal mode for the rural areas. As Mamdani's analysis suggests, a subnational rural jurisdiction in which chiefly authority holds sway is not a miniature version of a national arena organized around a republican form of government. Although local units are nested into a national hierarchy, the modes of political representation, association, participation, and contestation that prevail at different levels of the system are not necessarily the same. Where a chiefly jurisdiction is nested into a national administrative hierarchy, the character and procedures of the national state are at least formally bureaucratic, secular, and constitutional, whereas at the local level, the character of public authority and government is at least partially hereditary, neocustomary, and nonsecular. African political systems are thus marked by what Schattschneider (1960) and Gibson (2005, 2012) have described as heterogeneity of scale.

For political analysts working within the closely defined frame of formal political institutions such as legislatures and electoral systems, structures of government and social organization in rural Africa have been nearly indecipherable. In most of rural Africa, transparent forms of socioeconomic accounting – such as tax rolls, social security records, and land registries – are absent, incomplete, or outdated. The nature and distribution of asset holding are opaque. Formal institutions and opinion registers that would allow outsiders to identify competing rural interest groups, their representatives, and their policy preferences are few and far between. Latifundia and landholding aristocracies that are recognizable from afar are absent, giving rise to the stereotype of rural Africa as strongly egalitarian.

African governments themselves have often claimed that custom and tradition prevail where modernity is held at bay, and they have promoted the image of rural communities as existing in a premodern state of social equality and political inertia. Most political analysts have not looked for or seen structural differentiation and institutionalized political forms in rural Africa; many seem to have simply assumed the absence thereof. In public opinion polling and some election studies, for example, rural African voters are often modeled as ethnicity-driven individuals (or groups) who act in an unstructured and institutionless political space. Patterned outcomes, such as the persistent salience of ethnic cleavages in voting, the structure of patronage hierarchies, the scope and limits of state penetration of local life, and even outbursts of violent conflict, are thus often attributed to cultural and ideational factors – and especially to the exaggerated role of ethnic identity in political life. This bias in approach leaves the institutional and structural factors that shape rural political behavior largely uninvestigated and untheorized.

This book has made four arguments about property institutions in rural Africa. First, they are created, enforced, and manipulated by states (both colonial and contemporary). Second, they are largely authority based rather than market based, and thus differ fundamentally from liberal forms of property. Third, they vary across space, providing the main analytic leverage point that we exploit in this analysis. And fourth, they have political effects – not only on forms of land-related conflict, but also on ethnicity and ethnic politics, the scale and scope of political competition within national territories, the politicization of local resource struggles, and electoral dynamics. This conclusion draws out ramifications of these arguments for comparative politics and African politics.

PROPERTY REGIMES AND COMPARATIVE POLITICS

Secure, credible private-property regimes are absent in many parts of the world. The field of comparative politics has yet to exploit the full implications of this fact. The “transitions to democracy” literature focused intently on the political effects of political institutions such as formal regime type and electoral rules, yet often ignored what classical political economy regarded as the institutional core of all economies: the property regimes. Transitions studies were built on the general belief that economic and political liberalization go hand in hand, and would work together to depoliticize property relations. Structural adjustment in the developing world and the fall of communism were believed to have liberated productive assets from political controls, weakening rulers and empowering individuals in society.