Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

This fascinating interdisciplinary book is about land, belonging, and the mortgage—and how people of different cultural backgrounds understand them in Africa. Drawing on years of ethnographic observation, Parker Shipton discusses how people in Africa’s interior feel about their attachment to family, to clan land, and to ancestral graves on the land. He goes on to explain why systems of property, finance, and mortgaging imposed by outsiders threaten Africa’s rural people. The book looks briefly at European and North American theories on private property and the mortgage, then shows how these theories have played out as attempted economic reforms in Africa. They affect not just personal ownership and possession, he suggests, but also the complex relationships that add up to civil order and episodic disorder over a longer history. Focusing particular attention on the Luo people of Kenya, Shipton challenges assumptions about rural economic development and calls for a broader understanding of local realities in Africa and beyond. (20100701)

This fascinating interdisciplinary book is about land, belonging, and the mortgage—and how people of different cultural backgrounds understand them in Africa. Drawing on years of ethnographic observation, Parker Shipton discusses how people in Africa’s interior feel about their attachment to family, to clan land, and to ancestral graves on the land. He goes on to explain why systems of property, finance, and mortgaging imposed by outsiders threaten Africa’s rural people.

 

The book looks briefly at European and North American theories on private property and the mortgage, then shows how these theories have played out as attempted economic reforms in Africa. They affect not just personal ownership and possession, he suggests, but also the complex relationships that add up to civil order and episodic disorder over a longer history. Focusing particular attention on the Luo people of Kenya, Shipton challenges assumptions about rural economic development and calls for a broader understanding of local realities in Africa and beyond.

Contents 8 Preface 10 Acknowledgments 16 CHAPTER 1 Introduction 22 CHAPTER 2 Sand and Gold: Some Property History and Theory 44 CHAPTER 3 Luo and Others: Migration, Settlement, Ethnicity 80 CHAPTER 4 An Earthly Anchorage: Graves and the Grounding of Belonging 106 CHAPTER 5 Birthright and Its Borrowing: Inheritance and Land Clientage Under Pressure 130 CHAPTER 6 The Thin End: Land and Credit in the Colonial Period 151 CHAPTER 7 The Ghost Market: Land Titling and Mortgaging After Independence 169 CHAPTER 8 Nothing More Serious: Mortgaging and Struggles over Ancestral Land 181 CHAPTER 9 Bigger than Law: Land and Constitutionalism 222 CHAPTER 10 Conclusion: Property, Improperty, and the Mortgage 244 Notes 276 Bibliography 310 Index 336 A 336 B 336 C 337 D 338 E 338 F 338 G 339 H 339 I 339 J 340 K 340 L 341 M 343 N 344 O 344 P 345 R 345 S 346 T 347 U 347 V 347 W 347 Y 348 Z 348 Illustrations follow page 73 95