“Colonial legacies have profoundly transformed land-tenure systems in West Africa by imposing legal and economic models that often conflict with local practices,” said Iso Lomso fellow Aïdas Sanogo of the Department of Socio-Anthropology, Philosophy and Psychology, Université Norbert Zongo, Burkina Faso. “Drawing on empirical data from Bouaké in Côte d’Ivoire and in Kumasi in Ghana, I’m exploring how the underlying dynamics of control and land inequality remain largely shaped by the colonial legacy. Continuity does not stem from the absence of change, but rather from the fact that these transformations have not fundamentally altered the structures inherited from colonialism and coloniality. Land tenure in West Africa thus remains an area where the past still exerts a strong influence on the present.”
Opening with a vignette from her fieldwork in Bouaké, Sanogo pointed to the sense of fatalism from some of her respondents many of whom have faced relocation multiple times due to strategic developments like airports and emphasise that they feel they are eternally starting over, that things pretend to change but the poor remain poor.
“They were here before the state,” she said, “and the compensation offered only covered the house, not the land. They believed land compensation should be separate because of their spiritual connections to the land. But on subsequent visits many of the occupants had left – saying you can’t stop a thief so you may as well comply. Leaving the land was only due to necessity.”
Sanogo emphasised that she is looking at two towns in West Africa and not claiming they represent the region. She started working in these towns from 2016. She described her methodology as a mixture of patchwork ethnography based on shorter amounts of time in the field than would be ideal, and long-sleeve ethnography which is about maintaining ongoing social-media contact rather than being in place in the field.
The people in the two towns are largely from the same cultural group – Akan – a major West African ethnolinguistic group primarily found in Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire and Togo. Ghana was under British colonial rule for 83 years, from 1874 to 1957, while Côte d'Ivoire became a French colony in 1893 and attained independence in 1960.
Sanogo explained that in the precolonial period Akan land tenure was based on chieftainship and passed by matrilineal lineages. Land and property ownership was a very hierarchical, interdependent system with paramount, divisional and village chiefs who also provided dispute resolution and security. The ultimate legal authority was the supreme chiefs.
The French and British colonial rulers both introduced changes with the French focusing on direct rule, the land belonging to the state and initial reliance on divisional chiefs, while the British introduced indirect rule with legal rules inherited and localised including a recognised plurality of property rights. But, although there were differences, both stressed the idea of proof of land ownership via legal papers.
“These different systems under English and French rule were not a win for lineage inheritance,” said Sanogo. “They changed the type of land disposals and encouraged disruption and uncertainty.”
Post independence the previously French-ruled countries saw a plethora of laws regarding land but largely a policy of the land belonging to the state. In the previously British colonies, there were a succession of land-title registration laws and land acts that openly recognised a mixture of ’customary law and statutory.
“After independence it was mostly a copy-and-paste which benefitted only a small elite minority while the vast majority still suffer,” said Sanogo.
“The introduction of private property, and the designation of ‘vacant and ownerless lands’, allowed both the colonial and post-independence state authorities to legitimate the appropriation of vast territories. These policies have contributed to the emergence and persistence of a plurality of norms, discourses and practices that continue to fuel tensions and inequalities,” she explained. “This diversity manifests itself across a broad spectrum that is often polarised between so-called customary law (collective, oral, socially rooted) and so-called modern or statutory law (centralised, written, oftentimes disconnected from local practices). After independence most independent West African states retained colonial legal frameworks such as land acts or state ownership of land but also recognised customary rights to a limited extent, or in an ambiguous manner. This overlap of diverse discourses and practices contributes to land-tenure insecurity and fuels conflicts in both rural and urban areas.”
In post-independence Cote D’Ivoire because the idea – initiated by the first president Felix Houphouët Boigny – was that land belongs to he who develops it, many migrants rushed in and began to outnumber the locals. These migrants even helped to re-elect the president before being forced out via xenophobia.
In Ghana attempts to consolidate state power sidelined traditional chiefs and land disposal destabilised local politics.
Turning in detail to her case studies Sanogo pointed to the different types of land ownership in Kumasi – namely stool or skin (referring to chiefs), family, public-vested, private individual land and state land. “About 80% of the land in Ghana is stool and skin,” she said. “It’s difficult to have private land which is basically in the hands of old money and an elite minority of those who spoke colonial languages at the time, namely the minority who knew how to read and write, as well as the church.”
There are usually 99-year leases for stool lands which can be renewed although the renewal can be a lengthy and cumbersome process.
“In Bouaké the land still belongs to the state with the state ceasing its rights to individuals provided they follow the rules. Since 2024 the involvement of customary usage rights has been made a bit more prominent in the land reforms – but the state is still considered as the sole entity that overlooks land acquisition processes. Oftentimes in urban areas, the various steps demanded are not rightly followed, and dwellers settle in areas that will later be ’regulated’ according to the state’s rules,” she said.
“However, most people don’t care about decrees because they don’t read or write in French or English and the laws are still in these languages.”
“For both these countries land became commodified and detached from cultural identity,” she added. “What is regarded as a written right does not necessarily correspond with family rights. Attachment to the land is more than economic but now the people are following the commodification route.”
Sanogo also noted that the matrilineal inheritance system has been affected by increasing cosmopolitanism especially in cities as well as marriages and relationships between people from different groups.
Presenting further vignettes, Sanogo pointed out that many dwellers lack access to documents and question the very idea of land-ownership papers.
“It’s the art of still sprinting,” she said. “There are different approaches and names but the majority of dwellers say it’s as if you must pretend things are changing when they don’t change at all. Those who benefit from the status quo are not willing to change. They say: ‘If they want papers, we will give them papers, but nothing changes for those without access to money or networks’.”
