Land Tenure Status of African Women

Leslie Gray
Department of Demography
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
lgray@demog.berkeley.edu

Michael Kevane
Department of Economics
Santa Clara University
Santa Clara, CA 95051
408-554-6888
mkevane@mailer.scu.edu
 

Background paper for Project on Gender and Property Rights in Africa, The World Bank. Authors are in alphabetical order. Please address surface mail correspondence to Michael Kevane.
 

1. Introduction

There is a common story about women and land tenure status that transcends ethnic, cultural and national boundaries in sub-Saharan Africa.⁽¹⁾ The story begins by placing women not as 'owners of land' but rather as 'owners of crops'.⁽²⁾ They have rights to cultivate, and rights to dispose of crops and crop income, but not rights to allocate or alienate land. Their ultimate rights to use land are associated with their position toward men- as mothers, wives, sisters and daughters. More importantly, when land becomes scarce or rises in value, or when rights are formalized through titles or registration, these rights to use land are revealed to be secondary and tenuous. The right to receive turns out rarely to be as compelling as the right to give. Men use their position of dominance in society to 'expropriate' women's rights to land.⁽³⁾ Women, whose rights to farm a plot of land were guaranteed by marital or kinship status, lose these rights and face a diminished tenure status that underlies and reinforces a greater economic and social insecurity. The literature on women's access to land is replete with examples of these dramatic reductions in rights.

Researchers tend to draw two lessons from this story, one focusing on the efficiency effects and the other on the equity effects. For the major surveys of the evolution of land tenure in sub-Saharan Africa (Bassett and Crummey (1993), Berry (1993), Downs and Reyna (1988), Bruce and Migot-Adholla (1994), Platteau (1996)), land registration and titling schemes across the continent failed to appreciate the chaos and confusion caused by uncompensated expropriation of 'secondary' forms of tenure (of which the 'secondary' rights of women are but one example). This led to the schemes undermining tenure status. The common wisdom is that the state should be less involved in formalizing tenure relations, and local institutions should evolve undisturbed. For the gender-oriented and feminist literature on agricultural relations in sub-Saharan Africa, the specific failure to counteract the erosion of women's rights caused by increases in the value of land has caused a worsening of the position of women. Recommendations for alleviating the dwindling of rights tend towards more involvement; legal reform and donor-driven projects are but two examples of how the state can stem the inequitable evolution of local institutions.

These sometimes contradictory trends have led to interesting contemporary 'official' actions. States that have abandoned any pretense to maintaining registries and adjudicating titles have taken instead to targeting tenure reforms and legal innovations to women's issues. Special laws of intestate succession have been adopted in Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe and Zambia.⁽⁴⁾ Irrigation projects that have learned that flexibility and freedom are important for good performance are attempting to mandate and manage intra-household negotiations over property. Donors who have turned sour on the cost-benefit ratio of tenure reform willingly fund women's group forestry and gardening projects that indirectly but dramatically reshape local tenure relations.⁽⁵⁾

This paper will explore a number of different facets to this story and its interpretations. Changes in rights from 'above' have implications for women's tenure status, yet other factors are determining shifts in the use of these rules of access. Increasing commercialization, population growth and concurrent increases in land value alter the costs and benefits of exercising rights (and induce men and women to invest in changing rights). By exploring the strategies that men adopt to justify and enforce denial of women's rights to land, and the strategies that women use to counteract these actions, we will examine how these reactions from 'below' are leading to far-reaching changes in broader social structure. New and evolving structures of marriage, inheritance and corporate groups (such as lineages) alter in unexpected ways the paths through which women obtain access to land.

A primary focus of this paper will be an examination of how women's rights to land are changing and evolving. However, descriptions of the nature of women's rights- how they are obtained, whether they are secure or insecure, exclusive or inclusive- do not give a full picture of how women are exercising their rights. For example, women may gain rights through marriage, but if few women are marrying, then these rights are meaningless. It is important that researchers go beyond characterizing women's land rights and focus on the incidence of their exerting their rights. When discussing land tenure in general (i.e., referring to men) this distinction is not seen as important, except for the occasional paper warning of incipient land concentration. Instead the focus is exclusively on rights- their movement from communal to individual, multiple to exclusive, non-transferable to alienable. With women, changes in rights may be overwhelmed by changes in the incidence with which rights are exercised.

Moore and Vaughn (1988:210), in an excellent discussion of agrarian change in northern Zambia, point to this distinction. They first argue that competition over land that makes "poorer households, especially female-headed households... experience difficulties when trying to gain control over plots... partly because they do not have the necessary labor." In other words, the incidence of exercising rights to acquire land falls. Then they switch gears: "As the value of these different resources changes unequally, individual men and women seek to redefine their ownership and control of them through the relabeling and recategorization of fields..." That is, the cost of exercising 'traditional' rights generates a demand for renegotiating other forms of access to land- maybe by relabeling land previously the exclusive domain of men, but now of lower value and hence more amenable to reinterpretation as 'female' land. The question this distinction raises, an important question that few researchers ask or answer, is whether the changing land tenure status of women is due to changing fortunes or changing rights.

The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 proposes a typology of land tenure systems in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of the land rights they afford women. Sections 3 through 5 examine the dynamic interplay between changes in rights and the incidence of exercise of those rights. Section 3 discusses two processes- delayed marriage and redefined rules of inheritance in matrilineages- that are leaving women with insecure rights and reduced incidence of control over land. Section 4 tackles how donor and government interventions undermine women's rights and the frequency of exercise of those rights. Section 5 presents some processes through which women are creating new forms of secure rights, and processes that women use to lower the costs of exercising their rights. Section 6 integrates these discussions into a model of tenure status. Section 7 detours through some empirical issues. Section 8 concludes.

Three caveats are in order. Sources on land tenure in Africa, despite a number of recent collections, are still scattered and disjointed. We have tried where possible to use contemporary sources, but the definition of contemporary used refers all the way back to the now cloudy 1970s (which for us are still 'modern times'); so we use throughout a kind of 'ethnographic post-independence present'. Second, we will talk of 'customary' and 'traditional'; the sense in which these should be interpreted is that they are uncodified/unwritten local norms, interpreted by local authorities some of whom may be representatives of the state, and acted upon by local people.⁽⁶⁾ They are not static and they are not always hegemonic and they are sometimes contradictory as systems in the sense of leaving it up to authorities to 'arbitrarily' decide which irreconcilable principle is relevant in particular cases. Finally, inevitably in a paper of this type, we use throughout the phrase, "among the so-and-so". Like all "so-and-so" people, African social groups are composed of multiple smaller groups; they are mutable, complex and define themselves in ways not always the same as the are defined by others. At the cost of appearing to over-generalize, we have avoided labeling each group with a specific, local, geographic site.⁽⁷⁾
 

2. A Typology of Women's 'Traditional' Rights to Land

Africans gain, maintain or lose access to land through multiple paths, as members in social groups or networks, through labor and investment, and through purchase (Shipton and Goheen 1992; Berry 1993). Women's land use rights have most often come through their social ties to kin and husbands. These rights are contingent on status; a senior wife may have stronger rights than a junior wife. A woman's rights may increase with the length of marriage or with more children. Guyer (1986), writing about the Beti in Cameroon, notes that widows come in three types: old women, young women without children, or only with daughters, and young widows with sons. The value to her kin, and to herself, of various options depends greatly on her type. An old woman remains with her sons. The younger woman without children will be evicted. The woman with young sons will remain with her husband's kin- tenuously surviving and protecting the interests of her sons (which may be her own interest) against in-laws who would rather exercise closer control over her deceased husband's farms.

A woman's rights depend on her social position and role in both customary and statutory law. Customary and statutory law encompass rights of divorce, widowhood and inheritance. Customary law also frequently enjoins a husband to provide his wife with land, a requirement absent from most statutes. The co-existence of two 'authorities' that may be appealed to and manipulated creates a complex system translating ascribed status labels to specific rights. These are not two 'separate' systems, each acting independently with no cross-references. As van Donge (1993:212) pointed out, "one cannot speak in Mgeta of a clear distinction between a form of modern, individual or commoditised land tenure and traditional, corporate or pre-capitalist forms of land ownership. The former forms have no meaning outside the context of the latter."

The exception rather than the rule of African land tenure relations are systems in which women have rights to land that allow them to alienate or allocate land. Below we present two of these exceptional systems. First is where Islamic norms of inheritance have codified women's rights to inherit and transfer land. We find that these rights, when applied, are persistent and are not generally abandoned with new relations of production and land-holding. The second case is where women have strong customary rights that allow them to transfer land. These rights appear to be highly mutable in nature; with increased levels of commercialization, they have become less insecure. Nevertheless they remain strong.

More common is to find systems where women have only limited rights, as in the 'common story' of the introduction. We reviews three such types of systems. In Sudan-Sahelian West Africa, where women usually have very limited rights to cultivate on their own-account, growing land scarcity and concentration are shrinking their allotments. In East Africa, where the house-property complex gave women certain kinds of well-defined rights, in terms of their role in transmitting property from fathers to sons, land registration and titling have gone exclusively to men. In Southern Africa, by contrast, the presence of very large numbers of female-headed households has put pressures of government to protect the rights of women. These 'systems' are by no means hard and fast, and plenty of social groups in the geographic and cultural areas identified have quite different patterns of rights for women.

i. Areas influenced by Islamic inheritance laws

Probably the areas of sub-Saharan Africa where women have historically had the strongest rights to land occur where they inherit land according to the precepts of Islamic law. Caplan's (1974) study of inheritance rights in a Swahili village is a case in point; women on Mafia island off the Tanzania coast have strong rights not only in bush land, but in higher value coconut land (or more correctly, in the trees; a general and dispersed descent group, that appears to have no active rights other than prohibiting sale of land, 'owns' the land). Upon the death of a father a daughter can inherit a share of her parent's property equal to one-half of her brother's. Husbands and wives also inherit each others property; a woman receives one-eighth of her husband's property, while a husband can receive a quarter of his wife's property. Caplan claims that women, on the whole, are more likely to inherit coconut land from their husbands than vice versa because they tend to live longer. Valuable coconut groves are not only inherited, but presented to women as a marriage payment or compensation upon divorce. Daughters retain rights to their land even when they have married out of their kin group.

Most areas where principles of Islamic inheritance dominate have a strong connection to Arab culture, be it Swahili peasants on the coast of Tanzania or farmers in eastern Sudan. The Gezira area of Sudan is another case. Under the auspices of the Gezira scheme, one of the largest irrigation schemes in the world, land was confiscated (under national domain laws) from men and women, and redistributed to men only, in the form of semi-permanent tenancies. Yet over time women regained their access to land through Islamic inheritance (Barnett 1977). Bernal (1988) illustrates this case again when discussing how a Blue Nile irrigation scheme reduced women's control over and access to land by not allocating tenancies to women. Over time, though, women regained access to land through Islamic inheritance; in 1982 about 16% of tenants were women.

Being Muslim, of course, does not mean that a society will adhere to either the spirit or the letter of orthodox Islamic inheritance laws. Holy (1974) describes a Muslim society in western Sudan, where women inherit land but not according to Islamic custom. In Berti society, household fields are considered to be common property of spouses that are to be split evenly between husband and wife in the case of divorce. While this system may sound very advantageous to women, the Berti place little intrinsic value on agricultural land; it is not passed on through inheritance and its only value comes from the labor that is applied to clear it. Furthermore, women do not control valuable land planted with gum arabic trees. They do not inherit gum land and in the case of divorce rarely gain more than a token portion. If a divorce occurs, a woman's rights to land depend on her ability to press her claims, on "the initiative and activity which she shows when the property is divided in the presence of village elders" (1974:43).

Most Muslim societies in West Africa do not use principles of Islamic inheritance when redistributing land. Hill (1970:148) argues that there is nothing Islamic about inheritance among the Muslim Hausa:

... when a father dies, then, his manured farms are usually divided between his sons.... Lip service only is paid to the rules of Muslim inheritance... In so far as daughters receive shares, they often proceed to sell them to a brother.
 

Hennart (1978) concurs with respect to Niger. Yet Ross (1987) illustrates how in some areas of northern Nigeria, Hausa women do have rights to inherit land, even if they leave their communities upon marriage.

ii. Areas where local norms give strong rights to women

The social systems of sub-Saharan Africa differ from much of the rest of the wold, and one of the important differences is the relative preponderance of traditional societies giving considerable authority to women. The female market traders of West Africa, the women's riots of Nigeria and Cameroon, the queens and matriarchs across the continent; all attest to the occasional exceptional role of women. This section describes a number of areas where women have strong land rights.

The traditional view of women in central Africa, to take the best example, is that they have clear private rights to land. Keller, et al. (1990) summarize the early anthropological literature for the Bemba, Tonga and Lozi and illustrate how some of women's land could be passed on to their heirs, while some of their land was controlled by their husbands. Grundfest Schoepf (1985:5) writes that among the Lemba of Zaire, "Men say: we live at the homes of the women; the land here belongs to women; women have a say in everything we do; we listen to the opinions of women; and so on." Women live in their natal villages after marriage, allow their husbands to use their land, and pass the land on to their children. In nearby southern Malawi, Davison (1995:184) notes that, "The matrilineal banja household centers on the woman who has primary rights to land through her mbumba lineage..." The residents of Zomba District in Malawi also have the same practice of women owning the land and husbands coming to live with them (Hirschmann and Vaughan, 1984). Muntemba (1982:87) writes that among the matrilineal Tonga in Southern Province and the Lenje in Central Province, women who were married but lived virilocally retained access to land in their own matrikin villages. They could inherit and own property. Poewe (1981) describes the Luapula of Zambia where women have exceptional control over land. Van Donge (1993) finds that women on the nearby Uluguru Mountains in Tanzania are just as likely as men to own land and participate in disputes over land- on their own behalf or on behalf of their matriclan.

Women in West Africa often have strong customary claims on land they have cleared for low-lying rice swamps. In the Gambia, women have the right to pass this land on to their daughters and consider themselves as owners of this land (Dey 1981). In southwestern Burkina Faso, Goin women owned and inherited rice swamps (Dacher 1992), and in Sierra Leone women can appeal to their natal kin for rice fields for their exclusive use (Leach 1992). Linares () study of several villages in the Casamance region of Senegal reveals that in some villages women have rights to inherit and transfer rice land. MacCormack (1982:50) describes how women of Sierra Leone, a region well-known for substantially lower gender barriers to political and economic power, have multiple official roles. Rural women can act as compound head, descent group head, and Sande chapter [secret society] official. In these official capacities, women "control access to land, organize labor, receive tribute and make marriage alliances."

The introduction of cocoa into West Africa, and the interest it generated among early ethnographers and economists, provides another opportunity for observing strong female rights to land.⁽⁸⁾ Berry (1975:172, 180) notes that women in western Nigeria inherited cocoa land as personal property. Oppong, Okali and Houghton (1975:73) find that in several survey of cocoa communities in southern Ghana in the early 1970s women owned cocoa farms quite frequently, though, "men control two acres for every acre controlled be women." Mikell (1989:103) similarly reports that, "in contrast to the more southern cocoa areas like Akim Abuakwa, women in interior areas like the Sunyani District formed approximately one-eighth of any random sample of cocoa farmers... many were married and had children". Again the size of women's cocoa farms are much smaller than those of men; the median size of women's farms was roughly 8 acres, much smaller than men's median 160 acres, but there were women who owned more than 200 acres.

iii. Sudan-Sahelian West Africa⁽⁹⁾

In much of West Africa under extensive agricultural production land is of low value, government intervention is minimal, and women gain land chiefly through marriage. Single younger women rarely have rights in land. Widows may have rights to small plots in their natal community. Upon marriage a woman will generally be granted land controlled by her husbands lineage. These use-rights are precarious and contingent.⁽¹⁰⁾ Upon divorce, widowhood, and relocation, they generally lose these rights.

Three examples give a flavor of the system. Bohannan and Bohannan (1968) discuss how women's land rights among the Tiv of Nigeria depend on either residence or marriage. A wife or widow has the right to a plot of land large enough to support herself and her dependents. A wife who does not gain a plot of land after marriage has the right to leave and redemand her bridewealth.

Starns (1974) and Belloncle (1980) relate how some Hausa women in Nigeria and Niger (especially non-Muslim women) gain access to land through the gandu system that gives dependents (i.e., women) a plot of land from the general family holdings.⁽¹¹⁾ These plots are considered to belong to the individual during their lifetime on which they work a specified number of days. These plots may never be alienated by their holders without the permission of the lineage head. Upon the death of the land holders, the senior lineage male will return the plot to the corporate group for reallocation to other lineage members.

Goheen (1988) illustrates how the rights of women in the Grassfields of Cameroon have come to approximate the more tenuous rights of their neighbors to the north. Women's land is generally planted under food crops, in contrast to men's more permanent rights to land planted in coffee and other tree crops. Women's access to their land has become less secure; Kaberry's study of women's access to land in the same region, conducted in the 1940's, showed that women had complete control of their personal land and were able to transfer it to others. Not only do women no longer have this sort of control over land, but they will not leave their plots in fallow, for fear that it will be taken from them.

iv. East Africa: The 'house-property' system

Perhaps the most frequently cited system where a woman obtains use rights to land upon marriage is the East African 'house-property complex'.⁽¹²⁾ A man allocates to each of his wives cattle, farm land and homestead land. While cattle would invariably remain under the control of the husband, wives would frequently be the 'managers' of the land allocated to them, with much control over day to day decision making. Gulliver (1955), for example, notes that women in semi-pastoral Jie society of northwestern Kenya had well-defined rights to garden land right around household settlements, but only after they had married and moved to their husbands compound. A wife, he argues (ibid:60), "owns her garden land absolutely and in no way at the discretion of her husband...The produce...is her own to use or disperse of... she retains all the goods or cash obtained."

In the house-property complex, a husband cannot alienate the land without the wife's permission. She would insist on her 'veto' right, or at least on her right to subsequent compensation, since her children- and not the children of any co-wive and not the members of any lineage- would inherit the land upon the husband's (their father) death. Her children would be providing her old-age security. Oboler (1986) argues that widows in Nandi society, though they have few options for remarriage, are better off than women from other Kenyan groups because of the house-property system. At the time of marriage a woman receives a marriage settlement in the form of her husband's property that will belong to her descendants, even if she is subsequently divorced (as long as she has sons). As Oboler puts it, (1986:67): "House property means that a widow can have secure property rights without maintaining an ongoing relationship with any members of her husband's family."

These secure rights are temporary and contingent in an unusual way; instead of depending on the good will of a husband, a woman depends on having sons, and then depends on the good will of her son. If a widow has no sons, then her deceased husband's patrilineal kin inherit his land and cattle (LeVine and LeVine 1966). As Glazier (1985:111) puts it, "Inheritance is thus patrilineal, although rights to property are passed on through women who, paradoxically... cannot own productive property outright." Her sons will claim the land when they are older, and they will have the power to allocate land to their wives.

v. Southern Africa

Southern Africa presents a complex picture in terms of tenure. Although we have noted earlier some matrilineal areas with strong rights for women, the dominant pattern seems to be of male-controlled land. In these areas, three forces appear to be working against the same kind of further erosion of women's rights normally in evidence, and indeed in some cases towards an expansion of rights. The first is the enormous migration into South Africa for predominantly male migrant labor. The second is continuing steady agricultural growth that has raised rural wages and increased the value of family labor. The third is active political processes where women can be significant constituencies, or at least constituencies whose interests are served to a higher degree than elsewhere.

In Zimbabwe, Fortmann and Nontokozo (1992) present a 'model' land tenure system where Shona and Ndebele women received land through membership in patrilineages, according to their status as wives or as daughters. Daughters obtained land from male lineage heads who in turn obtained land from chiefs and headmen. Daughters' production on their fields would be exchanged for material for marriage. A divorced daughter could gain land through this avenue as well. Married women obtained land rights from their husbands. These rights were maintained as long as the marriage endures. As in West Africa, the erosion of these secondary rights is seen as inevitable.

And yet there are forces shoring up women's tenure status. Cheater (1982, 1990) has brought to the fore the central role of female tenure in discussing the land question in Zimbabwe. She uses her data showing the high proportion of women with usufruct rights to argue that the 'model' of traditional tenure in 'communal' and 'freehold' areas is belied massively by on-the-ground reality. In the 'model', as we noted, women have no direct rights, "only temporary usufruct within the lineage system through their husbands or male patrikin" (1990:191). In reality, Cheater (1982:84-5) argues, "women as affines would appear to be using their importance as farm workers to acquire... land in their own right." Her data from the freehold area of Msengezi shows that the number of women holding usufruct rights increased from 165 women in 1972 to 327 women in 1980. Additionally, Cheater argues that the rights of widows are considerably stronger than elsewhere. Though not recognized in either customary or formal law, in practice a widow is usually guaranteed rights to manage her husband's land until she chooses to relinquish control to the heirs. Finally, she presents a most interesting newspaper account of a land dispute between a man who had purchased land from a woman. The woman claimed she had not intended to sell, and that the land had been inherited from her mother-in-law. About this Cheater (1990:195) can only exclaim in wonder:

Legitimation of the rules, in the reported views of civil servants, comes from legislation, not tradition; the 'illegality' of purchasing land by men is trumped by the ownership of land by women, and its transmission- well beyond any rules of the family or matri-estate... between female affines...
 

In a system where women supposedly have little control over land, this example shows that they are not only owning land, they are selling it and, even stranger, they are inheriting it from their mothers-in-law. Perhaps one should take a more humble attitude about the state of knowledge of women's land rights in southern Africa.

Where Cheater focuses on the effects of women's increased value as farm workers, Fortmann and Nontokozo (1992:5) outline a contentious legal environment that demonstrates the importance of pro-female advocacy in Zimbabwe. Many argue that in traditional tenure widows have (ibid, 5), "no right to inherit and are therefore without even the theoretical protection provided to divorcees by the Matrimonial Causes Act." The Zimbabwe Supreme Court recently upheld a version of customary law that did not recognize the right of a widow to be appointed as heir to her deceased husband's intestate estate. But other legal actors have taken a different view: "Community courts have with increasingly frequency appointed widows as the heir to their deceased husband's estate when he dies intestate." New national laws do guarantee that the daughter may inherit land, thus preventing the deceased husband's family from taking the land in cases where a widow has no sons. Another recent law allows a grace period of one year before the husband's customary heirs can acquire the property, which may give woman an opening to negotiate a settlement with the husband's relatives. A law permitting equal inheritance of property by daughters and sons was enacted, only to be reversed with the government "holding that a son would be preferred as heir over a daughter regardless of who was the elder."

Similar contradictions between customary and statutory laws regarding women's inheritance are seen across the border in Zambia. Statutory laws have been partial to women, but are often ignored in favor of customary laws that work against women's interests. When it comes to inheritance of property, the patrilineal and matrilineal societies of Zambia privilege male agnatic ties over conjugal ties. Widows therefore are not eligible to inherit property and face an onslaught of "property grabbing" by their husbands' relatives. Munalula and Mwenda (1995) report that recent statutory laws provide legal protection to widows, either by allowing their husbands to make wills declaring the nature of his wives' inheritance, or through the intestate Succession Act of 1989 that permits widows a 20 per cent share of her husbands property.

While it is tempting to think of this progressive model of women's land tenure rights in southern Africa applying to the whole region, there are areas where women have few rights. Murray (1981) describes how women in Lesotho, where migration of males is extremely high, and over 70% of households are headed by women, women do not historically have usufruct rights, although they do have rights over some of the household production. Women are responsible for agricultural production but have very little control over the resources needed to successfully undertake production.
 

3. Excluding Women through Custom: Manipulating Marriage, Matriliny and Meanings

Both rights to land, and the incidence of exercising rights, have been eroding over time.⁽¹³⁾ The position of women in rice areas have become tenuous with projects that reassign land for irrigated rice production to men. Keller et al. (1990) conclude that Zambian women's strong rights have weakened over time since colonial regimes started directing resources to male farmers, and prohibiting women from migrating to earn wage income in mine areas. Geisler, et al. (1985:5) remark that, "inheritance is said to follow more and more the patrilineal pattern." Women's farm ownership in higher value coffee and cocoa areas is clearly declining. In a synthesis of recent literature on bridewealth and marriage, Tambiah (1989:416) observed that, "...when 'permanent' cash crops like cocoa or tea have transformed the land on which they grow into patrimonial properties capable of being owned and transferred by owners by sale or inheritance, there too men have usually exercised the rights of ownership and excluded women (even where so-called matrilineal systems of kinship have prevailed)." But Tambiah neglects to inform the reader of how this transformation has been effected, or why men excluded women, or why women did not strengthen their rights. Certainly it was not the "cocoa and tea" that did the transforming, nor, in most countries, was it the state that transformed land rights through deliberate programs of titling.

As land increases in value, individual men and corporate groups dominated by men (especially patrilineage groups) find it in their interest to renegotiate and challenge, before traditional authorities and statutory bodies, the direct and indirect ties that supported women's rights to land. As we have seen, two kinds of social structures have been important in enabling women to have secure tenure over land: their ties of marriage to a particular man, and their membership in kinship groups. Moore and Vaughan (1994:211) note: "In any discussion about land, various interested parties will push claims and interpretations. The ability to make these claims or interpretations stick is a function of local structures of power, influence, and personality." The power to press claims comes not only from overt political power, but the more subtle ability to manipulate the meanings and interpretations of notions of who has rights to what and where. Peters (1987) argues that people contest rights and claims by contesting meanings. Moore and Vaughan (1994:210) illustrate this in Zambia: gardens that were previously controlled by women are no longer under women's control because they have been reclassified as "ibala gardens for the production of staples." Land where staples are grown belong to men, so women lose control over their garden land. The authors argue that this strategy is common as people attempt to redefine ownership by manipulating the "relabeling and recategorization of fields, gardens, and other resources" (ibid).

Below we discuss two examples of how women's land tenure status changes, first through a change in practices that limits the exercise of rights, second through a process that relabels and redefines the rights that individual men and women have to land.

i. marital instability

What happens when the primary institution whereby women gain access to land breaks down?⁽¹⁴⁾ What happens when a woman's expectation of remaining married to a man are diminished? She has less incentive to contest her husband's stinginess in granting her land; less incentive to contest his arbitrary reallocations of land; in short, less incentive to activate her claims to land via her husband. Her husband, then, is left with more control over land, no longer encumbered by the claims of a long-term wife. If other men pursue similar strategies of monopolizing control over land, the strategies are self-reinforcing; the cost of securing the services of women will be lower since there are more single women willing to enter unions even without rights to land.

Hakansson (1986) describes how a whole category of landless women are appearing in Gusii areas of Kenya as the institution of marriage has changed. Until 1960's it was very rare to find unmarried adult women. After this time, men increasingly refused to pay bridewealth, and women started to 'elope'. Elopement means that women enter into a prolonged bridewealth repayment period. Until bridewealth is paid, then marriage has no legal status; women have no rights, and can be made to leave homestead at any time. As the men say, the women can be "chased away" if they do not work hard. While in the 1960's only 26% of women eloped, in the 1980's Hakansson found 87% eloped. Elopements and irregular unions that do not involve bridewealth payment have led to situations where wives are no longer necessarily absorbed into the patrilineal tenure system. These women can be expelled from a man's land easily. According to Hakansson (1986:10), "dissolution of informal unions are mostly initiated by men." Women's access to land is diminished. Women end up as single mothers, and have no rights to land in their patrilineal or children's fathers holdings.⁽¹⁵⁾

This is not a phenomenon unique to Kenya. Andre and Platteau (1996:29) find, in their careful study of a Rwandan village, "roughly two-third of the couples in N. have been married without inkwano [customary payment], and the proportion is obviously much higher among young couples." The effect of this is to give women little bargaining power in the marriage, and even less with respect to their own lineage should they divorce. In fact, Andre and Platteau argue that a divorced woman will leave her sons behind with her ex-husband, knowing that her lineage will not give them land.

ii. Cocoa and inheritance in Ghana: Changing matrilineal and patrilineal norms

One of the notable commonalities in sub-Saharan Africa is the preponderance of matrilineages and matri-focal institutions that appear to bolster strong rights to land for women. The literature comparing land access by women under matrilineal or patrilineal systems is, however, divided into two camps. One argues that under matrilineage women indeed have more rights to land.⁽¹⁶⁾ Berry (1988:6), for instance, states that, "...the proportion of [female] tree-crop owners who are women is relatively low...The chief exception is in areas of Ghana where descent is reckoned matrilineally... In some communities, fifty percent or more of the women own tree crops." The other argues that matrilineal areas exhibit no greater rights for women. Mikell (1984:196) finds that despite the expectations that "matrilineal systems were more liberal in granting rights to females" there was little difference in practice between matrilineal and patrilineal groups in giving women access to land to engage in cocoa-farming.

This variety of opinion is to be expected, because nothing in a norm that calls for succession of land to go from a man to his brothers and nephews rather than to his sons says anything about women's rights.⁽¹⁷⁾ Schlegel (1972), in a pioneering early study, used the Human Area Relations Files to argue that there was no simple, straightforward or necessary connection between women's status and matrilineality.⁽¹⁸⁾ So we should expect a similar variety of rights to land and other property in matrilineal societies as we see in patrilineal societies.

Furthermore, societies are rarely patrilineal in all respects, or matrilineal in all respects.⁽¹⁹⁾ Chanock (1985:177):

It appears more accurate to say that ... no people were either 'matrilineal' or 'patrilineal', and that the kinds of marriages entered into reflected relationships of power and, above all, of wealth.... As Monica Wilson discovered among the Nyakyusa in 1934, marriage was supposed to be patrilineal, virilocal and validated by cattle bridewealth. Yet there was 'lively tradition' of non-bridewealth 'matrilineal' marriage, which was 'regarded as a poor man's expedient which left him to an inferior status.
 

The cocoa belt of Ghana- dominated by the Akan (among whom the Ashanti are one famous group) conglomeration- illustrates the problems with attributing women's more advantageous tenure status to matrilineality. Contrary to a widespread supposition,⁽²⁰⁾ the matrilineal system had certainly not given way- after 70 years of planting high-value cocoa and oil palm- to a more efficient and incentive-oriented patrilineage system. In Akan society both men and women can own property. A man's 'ideal' heir is his sister's son, and he could designate him before death. Here lay the supposed inefficiency, for the sister's son did not actually work on the farm as he was growing up, but rather acquired it when older; while the man's son, who did work on the farm, would go off to his uncle's farm. In reality, at least according to Okali (1983:84), one of the few careful studies, matrikin were very likely to work part of the time on a man's farm. Okali also notes that there is an efficiency tradeoff- an heir will have incentives to work hard on the farm, but this incentive may lead to conflict with the current owner over farm strategy, and this conflict may be very costly.

If the man died intestate, the land could theoretically go to his brothers, or other males such as his sister's daughter's sons in the matrilineal line. Mikell (1989:113) finds that in 1970s brothers and nephews were listed as inheriting farms in over 50% of 172 cases in three villages.

A woman's property , which apparently did not include land before cocoa, was generally inherited by her sisters, daughters, or granddaughters. After the introduction of cocoa, women gained land or farms through their husbands; this involved the agreement of the donor's matrikin and a recognition of the gift by ritual aseda payment of liquor or money. These gifts of land were seen as a reward for the labor that they had applied to their husband's farm.

But the 'reward' seems to have been very uncertain. The same kinds of insecurity associated with a woman's marital status are also present in matrilineal social groups. Asare (1995) maintains that, "according to the Akan matrilineal inheritance norms, wives whose marital duties enjoined them to their husband's farming activities do not have any recognizable share of the farm on the death of the husband, a situation also applicable to the deceased's children. It is not uncommon for the matrilineal relatives of the deceased to evict, without compensation, wives and children from farms on which they have lived and labored all their lives."⁽²¹⁾ Okali (1983:8) notes that women prefer to work for themselves, because there has been an increased tendency for "matrilineal heirs to eject their predecessors" widows and children from the enjoyment of properties that they helped build." Dei (1994:143) echoes this interpretation of women's bleak prospects upon widowhood, and similarly suggests that they responded by working their own farms:

In household relations of production, the married couple had no community of goods, at least by customary law. The economic cooperation between the spouses could result in an insecurity for women, particularly when widows and children are cut off from inheriting the husband's and father's property. Women preferred to work for themselves, cultivating their natal rights to abusua land as an insurance against the future rather than to assist their husbands... In customary relations the distinction between family property and those self-acquired has always been tenuous.
 

Mikell (1984) takes this insecurity at widowhood one important step further, by observing that in Brong areas working on land that would be claimed by the matriline was not always as attractive as working and investing in land that would remain with daughters.⁽²²⁾ She claims that a woman did not just lose rights in her husband's fields upon his death, she also increasingly lost rights to her own fields. She became unable to designate an inheritor of her choosing because the matrilineage would claim her estate. This loss of rights occurred through the same process whereby men increasingly gained the right to designate an inheritor; men increasingly were successful in defining land as 'self-acquired' and outside the purview of the lineage while women increasingly found unsuccessful their arguments that land they farmed was 'female-property' . Men escaped the claims of the corporate body while women found themselves more incorporated.

The story Mikell (1984:209) tells is the familiar one of women struggling to retain their rights and tenure status. Brong women were successful cocoa farmers during the 1920's-40's, even though their farms were smaller than their male counterparts. But by the 1960's women had retreated from the market, and during the 1970's, when she conducted her study, the only women with cocoa farms were elderly women who had obtained their farms during the earlier period. Her interpretation of this decline: an apparent loss in a struggle over 'meanings':

Land did not exist as a sex-linked good before 1900, and the stool was the custodian of it. When land did begin to generate produce and raw materials intended for international markets, males tended to acquire it and pass it on to males. The females who began to acquire and control farm land after 1920 considered it their property (thus female property) and desired to pass it on to daughters and sisters...they did not list "brother" as the desired inheritor and seldom listed "son". Yet it is clear that the transmission of cocoa farms to female offspring was not taking place.
 

The analysis presumes that affective links to children more effectively supply old-age security and prestige than the diffuse responsibility of a corporate group. Certainly men seemed to increasingly adopt this view; cocoa farms purchased by Brong males were inherited by their sons rather than going to the matrilineage, or abusua. Women likewise seemed to want to pass land on to their sisters or daughters. Instead of arguing that these farms were 'self-acquired', they argued that they were 'female property', like movable property such as cattle or money that had always been inherited by women from their mothers or sisters.

They failed. Women's farms increasingly went directly to the abusua and generally went to males. Women, Mikell (1984: 212) argues, became less likely to invest in cocoa farms because they their farms were not "treated as female property but is treated as abusua property transferred to men following the death of their sisters."⁽²³⁾

Okali (1983) confirms this interpretation of the decline or erosion in the content of status of women's tenure. She finds that in the early 1970s 55% of Akan 'citizen' women owning cocoa farms in the village of Akokoaso, and another 36% owning food farms. Even among 'stranger' women, about 15% owned their own farms. Most of these women were unmarried- either widowed, divorced, or not yet married. Yet there were significant numbers of married women with own farms, and some women whose husbands worked on their farms. This strong presence of women in the cocoa economy did not appear sustainable. Court cases were favoring the rights of men to pass their farms on to their sons, and disfavoring the rights of women to exercise independent rights over their own land.

Bukh's (1979) study of patrilineal Ewe cocoa farmers confirms that the lineage system may not be relevant in determining tenure status; one sees the same erosion of women's rights under cocoa. The patrilineage used to assure all women a parcel of land to cultivate, but women were increasingly having to ask permission from men to use their fallow land, or go about 'begging' land, as Bukh calls it, borrowing land from men that do not belong to her lineage. This situation has become more complicated with cocoa production. A man might not give land to his daughter as he is afraid that it will be alienated from his lineage; if the daughter plants tree crops, then her children, who might not belong to their father's lineage and not their mother's, might claim the trees, and the land will then be passed on through the children's father lineage. Similarly, a wife may not be allowed to plant trees on her own farm, since upon her death her husband's patrilineage might claim the land.
 

4. Excluding Women through the State

The 'State' is not always a monolithic inexorable force denying women tenure status. Indeed, as illustrated elsewhere in this paper, states often intervene to regulate land tenure systems and mitigate their negative effects on women. This section focuses on several instances of projects or programs that have detrimentally altered women's access to land. First we discuss how land titling and registration programs in East Africa have expropriated women's land rights, then investigate the intended and unintended effects of irrigation projects on women, and conclude with a mention of the role of subsidized inputs targeted to men.

i. Land titling in East Africa

Arguments in favor of land titling in Africa have focused on several potential benefits. A titling program gives the title-holder a valuable asset; he or she can sell the title and benefit from the intertemporal gains from trade from holding an asset (Besley 1995). Owning an asset also gives land collateral value; farmers can use their land to borrow for investment or inputs. Farmers with a high degree of rights and security will make investments on their land, thus increasing the value of the land and increasing the productivity. Finally, security in tenure reduces costly effects of litigation which increases when land becomes more valuable.

In much of Africa, however, land titling in practice has had the opposite effect of creating tenure insecurity and demising access. Platteau (1996:40) argues that, "In effect, if titling may reduce risk and transactions costs for some categories of people, it may simultaneously create new uncertainties for others categories which rely on customary or informal practices and rules to establish and safeguard their land claims." During the land registration process sub-groups "face a serious risk of being denied legal recognition of their customary rights to land"(ibid:40).

State involvement in the allocation of land through formal registration and titling has had a tremendous effect on women's access to land. Women, whose access to land has historically been guaranteed through customary channels, have generally been denied access through formal titling and registration. In the titling process, express norms against women 'owning' land trumped their rights to the use of land through marriage or kin. Under formal titling they are dually condemned; land is no longer available through customary channels and women are severely restricted in their financial and social ability to gain land through government or market routes.

Kenya is undoubtedly the stellar example of the negative effects of land registration and titling. The ideology of exclusive rights over land, set forth by European settlers, was followed after independence as the government continued the policy of consolidating land under individual ownership. These policies gave "precedence to individual ownership invested in male heads of households and in turn marginalized the usufruct rights of women formerly guaranteed under lineage tenure" (Davison 1988:165). The effect of this is that women in Kenya are now cultivating smaller parcels than their mothers did (Davison 1988). Shipton's (1988) study of land tenure reform among Luo speaking farmers in Nyanza province in western Kenya illustrates how seven years after a reform program had been completed only 7% of registered land parcels had women as joint or exclusive owners. He argues that "registration has effected a hardening on men's land rights into absolute legal ownership, to the exclusion of women and children" (1988:119).

A women's marital status is very important in determining how she will be affected by land registration. Widows are particularly vulnerable because land is generally registered in the husband's name and upon the death of their husband they are not considered heirs. Fleuret (1988) describes how Taita women in southwestern Kenya did not own land, but had well developed use rights after marriage. Widows had particularly strong rights, as they could "sell, pawn, or lend parcels on behalf of minor heirs" (1988:140). After registration, however, their rights to act on the behalf of their guardians were limited, because the land is registered in only the husband's name. In central Kenya, Davison (1988) relates how widows continued to farm land in that was registered in their husband's name after his death. In most cases they are secure; their male children will eventually inherit land and continue to let their mothers farm land. With recent increases in land sales, however, women are questioning their security as it is not uncommon for sons to sell their land without their mothers' permission. Widows without male children are especially vulnerable as the land customarily goes to her husband's relatives.

Unmarried or divorced women have very few options for gaining land in this system. They can remain and work with their family, but when they have children, their fathers are hesitant to give them a plot of land that should go to his sons. In practice, most fathers transmit land to their sons, although they can legally transfer to their daughters (Davison 1988).

While land is registered through formal means, the modes of transmission and adjudication of complaints are frequently conducted through customary norms. Shipton (1988), for example, describes how among the Luo, local adjudication committees were generally all male and unpaid, and expected food and drink to be provided. Women were effectively deterred from bringing up complaints to the committee because they could not afford the goat or sheep that would provide the meal and because interested women were kept from attending meetings as they were responsible for food preparation.

Mackenzie (1993) contests the much asserted idea that in Kenya with the introduction of freehold tenure and land registration, customary rights to land have been discontinued. She (1993:195-196) sees "both customary law and statutory law as arenas of struggle to which both men and women have access." In particular, Kikuyu men attempt to gain control over women's land by invoking the notion of mbari, the basic unit of Kikuyu society that unites ideas of kinship and territory. By invoking mbari inheritance norms, families can maintain territorial integrity. Mackenzie cites an example of a woman who gained title to her deceased husband's farms, but then attempted to divide it among her daughters, even though she retained title. The daughters were forced off their mother's land by their deceased father's elder brother who believed it was his land by right of mbari customary inheritance. The uncle proceeded to divide the land amongst his sons.

Women also use both customary and statutory law to press their claims. As described below, they use institutions such as woman-to-woman marriage to repudiate claims of a deceased husbands relatives. But they also use official legal channels. Haugerud (1989) argues that it is not uncommon for a wife to prohibit the sale of a piece of land by her husband by placing a complaint with the land registrar's office, who may then prohibit any land sale. She notes that about 2.5% of the 1,117 titles registered in the Embu coffee and cotton areas have such restrictions placed on them.

Registration, of course, has not been entirely negative for women. It has allowed other opportunities for women as in some cases women are able to buy and sell parcels of land and bequeath it to who they wish (Fleuret 1988). Shipton (1988) also maintains that some women, particularly widows, have gained from land registration as they have obtained titles in their own names that can be left to whoever they wish and are protected from their husband's relatives. But, he argues, these cases are very few; overall, the position of women in terms of rights to land is precarious.

Amare (1994), describing the effects of land redistribution in Ethiopia, contends that the legal position of women has improved since land reform when the Ethiopian government assigned joint ownership of land to married couples. After divorce, a woman could claim up to half of the land they cultivated together. In practice, this is not always the case, but he contends that overall the practice of granting land to divorcees is widespread. An auxiliary effect of this is that women are much more secure in marriage. Before the revolution, rates of divorce were very high; after divorce women could only take their movable property and land that they brought with them to the marriage. Now most peasant's perceive that divorce is much less common as "divorce could entail a disastrous division of land resources that would impoverish both resultant households" (ibid, 23). Despite a stronger position for married women, women's individual landholdings were somewhat negatively affected. Before the revolution, women had access to inherited land which they could return to in case of a marriage breakup, but this option has now been removed.

Obbo (1980:44) writing about Uganda notes that the mailo system intoduced by the British were not adverse as it, "enabled women to inherit freehold land, and to rent or purchase land under customary tenure." She suggests that most women in her study area owned plots of land, and quotes one woman's reasons why they save in order to buy land:

Men fear that once you have bought a piece of land it is a sign that the wife is planning to leave them... I have some old friends [though] who have owned land ever since I can remember, but who have never left their husbands. It makes life easy for the woman to know that in the event of separation or divorce they can at least be assured of somewhere to go and where they could be self-supporting. In the past a woman would go and stay with her brother, but nowadays it is not easy to stay in people's homes.
 

Wanjama, et al. (1995) report that even the Kenyan government finally recognized the impact of land registration on women's rights to land and in 1990 issued an administrative directive to ameliorate the discrimination against women's land acquisition, inheritance, and rights over land alienation. This directive limited the ability of men to sell land without the consent of their wives and children, allowing the first child as the representative of all the children and allowing female children to have a say in stopping land sales.⁽²⁴⁾

ii. Irrigation projects

Women's reduced access to land under irrigation project illustrate how tenuous women's rights are under certain systems. Below are examples of situations where women lose land under formal projects, even in cases that specifically target women.

Bloch (1993) examines women's access to land on small-scale irrigation plots along the Senegal and Faleme rivers in eastern Senegal. In traditional agriculture women have their own fields from which they control the income. The project, funded by USAID and a French NGO was managed by SAED, a parastatal agency created to develop the Senegal River Basin area. There is tremendous variation in women's participation. Women in some villages are eligible for land equal to that of men, while women in other villages are eligible for a smaller portion or not eligible for land at all. In another irrigated perimeter in Senegal, Weigel (1982:320) notes that farmers reproduced the pre-irrigation scheme, guaranteeing married women rights to individual plots through their husbands.

Several authors have studied the effect of irrigated rice cultivation on women's access to land in the Gambia (Brautigam 1992; Carney and Watts 1991; Dey 1981). In the Gambia, farmers recognize both common and individual land rights. Women historically controlled rice fields that they cleared with their own labor. Their rights to this land were well defined: they controlled the production from this land, but more significantly they controlled the right to transfer land, which they generally did, to their daughters.

These studies of three different irrigation schemes illustrate how women's access to land changed when the irrigation projects changed who could cultivate rice land. Brautigam (1992) argues that because the rice land was cleared and developed by men, men could claim the land as their personal plots. Some of these plots were categorized as household property that came under the control of male household heads; inputs and mechanized services were allocated overwhelmingly to men.

Carney (1988) describes how women's rights to irrigated rice land evolved in the Jahaly Pacharr irrigation project that was expressly aimed at women farmers who were ignored by other failed rice projects. About 13% of the irrigated rice land was registered in women's names, but "even though the land was registered in women's names, none of the pump-irrigated plots were considered their individual (kamanyango) fields. Irrigated plots throughout the project were designated by both men and women as maruo, or compound land" (ibid, p. 71).

Women's access to land was reshaped by redefining the meanings of the categories by which their access has traditionally been allocated. The new project allocated land to women, but that did not mean that women had the power to control it.
 

iii. Access to inputs

A corollary to the bias that projects enforce by allocating land to men is found in the allocation of inputs. The two are highly linked. Pottier (1988) describes how the control over village gardens by women, who constructed the gardens through their labor and controlled the production, began to be disputed by men in the 1970s. This was accompanied by an undervaluing of these gardens by the local Village Productivity Committee officials, as compared to the communal gardens and the main gardens. This gave rise to a situation where inputs and technological assistance were withheld from the former. Moore and Vaughan (1994:215) summarize Pottier's argument that "although women still controlled these gardens, they were disadvantaged in the eyes of local state officials...and their decreasing ability to influence decision making, further undermined their access to land."

Goheen (1988) reports that the Young Farmer's Resettlement Program in Cameroon was heavily biased towards men. This clearly disadvantages women who are the primary farmers in the area because farmer's gaining access to loans depended on their gaining control over three hectares of land and "neither lineage authorities nor national bureaucrats are willing to allocate land which will come permanently under a woman's control" (ibid:94). Geisler, et al. (1985) too find a clear male bias in Zambia, with women only receiving inputs, extension visits and credit through their husbands.

Von Bulow (1992) provides another example from Kenya where the Kenya Tea Development Authority was the governmental organization introducing tea to the Kipsigi area. Eligibility for support depended on having land title, which we have already seen was heavily biased towards men. The balance of power was skewed so far, apparently, that women refused to work on their husband's tea farms, and many were left uncultivated. Shipton (1992:370) also finds that giving title to men aided them disproportionately in access to credit; moreover, he adds that women increasingly risked dispossession as a result of this access. Their husband could default on a loan and lose the land, especially if, as was common, men used the credit for purposes other than agriculture.
 

5. Responding to Exclusion: Women Reshaping Access

So far we have concentrated on how states, projects and custom combine to reduce women's access to land, either through a redefinition and relabeling of rights, or through changes in the costs and benefits of exercising rights. We have not illustrated how women use different strategies to 'fight back'. These strategies emerge from two areas: first by operating through men's authority, utilizing relationships with male kin, husbands, and sons, to gain access to resources, and secondly by manipulating other routes of access, such as norms of women-to-women marriage, evading male authority in the process, and by forming associations (Besteman 1995). Below we have selected four of the many strategies women employ to illustrate the importance of these strategies in determining women's access to land.

i. Obtaining secure tenure through the 'modern' land market

Wealthier women have responded to tenure insecurity by purchasing land that is clearly in their name, that they can use and transfer as they wish. As Weiss (1993:31) puts it, with regard to gender and land in Tanzania, "over the on-going, contentious and fractious process of clan and family formation women's capacity to control farm land is severely restricted... as a consequence of these restrictions, women's practical attempts to control farm land dispose them to both buying and selling."

Probably the most abundant evidence of this trend comes from Ghana.⁽²⁵⁾ Dei (1994) has provided recent data from a Ghanaian market town showing that the incidence of purchase continues to be fairly high: "... data among the 450 sample households in 1989 show that for the 102 female-headed households represented, 83 (82 percent) were using lineage land, 11 (11 percent) outright purchase and 7... stool land." Another random survey he conducted found that 22 percent of 50 women obtained land by purchase.

Vellenga (1986) interviewed 100 women in two matrilineal Brong towns and 40 women in five patrilineal Ewe towns. Among the matrilineal Brong farmers, 43% of farms were purchased, whereas only 34% of patrilineal Ewe farmers purchased their farms. Concurrently, only 33% of matrilineal women received land from their matrilineage, whereas 58% of patrilineal women inherited land from their fathers. Vellenga speculates that the differences in purchases between the two groups of women may come from different expectations in the two lineage groups regarding inheritance and giving of cocoa farms. Brong matrilineal women may pursue a more diversified strategy of farm acquisition since they have lower expectations of gaining land through their matrilineal ties. The lack of data on area, and the non-random nature of the sample make it impossible to treat these as anything more that preliminary hypotheses, but they do point the way to an understanding of the incentives and expectations that different systems may provide.

ii. Using modern 'associations' to assure tenure

Dei (1994 :126-7) makes clear that women's access to the land market is not necessarily free from conflict, and suggests that it took organized action on the part of women to clear paths of access.⁽²⁶⁾ Women formed associations and purchased land collectively:

As part of the community coping strategies to the hardships of the early 1980s, the local chief [of Ayirebi town in southeastern Ghana] in 1983 released stool land to a group of women for rice farming...the successes of the group in later years brought pressure on the local leaders to end the traditional male bias for stool land... In 1988, the Zongo women utilized part of the accumulated projects from their five farming ventures to establish a 1.5 hectare cassava farm... the land was purchased from the local chief. In later years, the women have utilized their farm earnings to buy more lands for the cultivation and sale of additional cassava and maize farm plots.
 

That women's rights to purchase land may be strengthened through concerted group action is a recurring theme in the literature. Davison (1988:172) found that: "In Mutira [Kenya], several women's groups were working with local authorities to purchase land for members food cultivation."

Associations and organized political action towards 'modern government' can also be indirect means to assure tenure status within the customary framework. Schroeder (1993), Chilver (1992), and Newbury (1984), among others, discuss cases where women's groups, often organized with church, donor agency and non-governmental agency assistance, marched and protested to local state authorities. In the Gambian case discussed by Schroeder, they also represented themselves collectively to a donor agency, obtaining funding to permanently demarcate garden plots- over which they had only insecure customary tenure- with concrete and wire fencing.

Here it is interesting to remark on the class and ethnic loyalties that also divide women and may combine to result in a kind of paralysis in terms of women's rights. A dramatic case that illustrated this problem was the famous controversy in Kenya over rights to the estate and funeral of S.M. Otieno, a prominent member of the Kenyan bourgeoisie and judiciary. His widow, an urbanized, educated, Kikuyu woman, claimed that traditional Luo inheritance and funerary practices were not applicable to her 'family estate'. The ensuing court case, finally decided in favor of the Luo community and against the widow, provided the opportunity for considerable discussion and polling of attitudes and practices. Gordon (1995) interprets the consensus of Luo women as being against the widow; less favored women thought their rights and livelihoods would be better served by strengthening their rights, and the obligations of men, within customary practice.

iii. Manipulating customary institutions

Women invoke custom in the face of challenges to their traditional rights of land use. In Kenya, for example, where land titling and registration have reduced women's usufruct rights without compensating for this loss by granting formal rights, women circumvent male authority and gain or maintain control over land through the institution of female husbands. A childless widow or a widow without sons will take a wife and give her a part of her land as bridewealth to protect her access to her deceased husband's land. The woman-woman marriage that results will give the older 'female husband' an heir; according to Glazier (1985:116) the child of the young women (fathered perhaps by an agnate of the older woman) is considered to be "a descendant of [the]... fictitious son" the widow never had.

This provides options to widows with no sons who choose not to be inherited by a brother of her deceased husband, although women may use the 'right' to marry a brother of her deceased husband in the hopes of producing a son and keeping her property intact. In Nandi society, where a woman is not forced to accept a levirate arrangement, and few do so, female marriages have increased since land registration as women take a wife in order to keep their husband's property (Oboler 1985, Hakansson 1986:16). Langley (1979:73) noted that, "The practice is common; I know of no area of Nandi which I visited without hearing of an example in the neighborhood." The women are "considered husband and wife, and the older woman becomes the social and legal father of any children her wife may bear" (Oboler 1985:129). There can be problems with this strategy as Mackenzie (1993) demonstrates with her case study of a female marriage that was fraught with conflict over the amount of land that the wife's children from a previous marriage would receive from her female husband.

Obbo (1976) illustrates another type of female marriage. Women in Uganda- not widows- who have accumulated wealth through their own activities and mobilizing kinship ties, use their wealth to provide bridewealth to enter into marriages with other women. The two examples she discusses- not exceptional, apparently- were of women who owned land, had already had children, and wished to create households of their own. Hakansson (1986:16) finds an increase in this arrangement in Gusii areas of Kenya.

Women may also use strategies to bolster their own eroded traditional rights to land by entering into partnerships with male kin. Bestemen (1995) illustrates how women enter into partnerships with their sons in Somalia to circumvent their husband's-father's authority, in a system where very high divorce rates and polygynous marriage has been critical in reducing women's already tenuous access to land. Married and single women have few avenues of access to land and very little control over their own labor. Widowed women have few rights of inheritance or use of land, even if they have sons. For example, a woman with underage son has no right to farm her deceased husband's property until the son is adult and can allocate the land as he wishes. It will often lie fallow in the intermittent period, which is a time of great hardship for women and their children.

Women got around these restrictions over their access to land by forming partnerships with their sons. Sons acquire land, which then mother and son work jointly. All decisions are made jointly, with the mother responsible for all financial aspects. One women said "it's his land, but I'm the bank, so I keep all the money" (1995:205). These partnerships often occur after the death of a husband on the deceased husband's land, but also with senior wives and their adult sons in a polygynous household. Women are the primary decision makers in these relationships; the proceeds from the farms are split equally, but it is quite clear that women do not and will not, through these partnerships, control the land on which these partnerships are formed.

Hay (1976:93-95) describes a mother-son partnership among the Luo of Kowe, and ascribes "experimentation and innovation in agriculture" to the security of property created by the knowledge that a woman's sons would inherit the property she was partly responsible for managing. Indeed, it appears that a mother-son alliance (ibid., 101) was responsible for one woman acquiring considerable wealth and finally acceding to the normally male position of Jagolpur ("the one who begins cultivation").
 

6. A Model of Land Tenure Status for Women

It is now time to put all of these elements together into a coherent framework for examining the tenure status of women. Such a framework should incorporate three elements: a characterization of land tenure status; an assessment of major exogenous factors that influence land tenure status; and hypotheses about how those factors affect status.

i. Characterizing land tenure status

The general literature on tenure in sub-Saharan Africa has focused on rights alone, and not the incidence of the exercise of rights. Indeed, the major controversy in the literature has been whether one should characterize customary tenure as 'secure' or 'insecure', in terms of the duration (perhaps intergenerationally) of a landuser's tenure on a specific plot of land. Early writers thought that corporate 'ownership' and access through status rather than purchase necessarily meant rights were insecure; a chief, the village, a kinship group, could arbitrarily retract rights to use a specific piece of land. The consensus now is that rights are often quite secure (even though the tenurial status of women may be abysmal). In any case, 'tenure status' for a social group depends on three things, not just on rights: the different forms of access available to women; the content of the rights once access is gained; and the incidence of the various forms among the sub-group.

Forms of access have been the subject matter of this paper; women obtain land through inheritance, from their husbands, through the market, as members of lineages or women's associations. These forms of access may differ for different kinds of land; dryer uplands and poor quality land may be accessible through various forms, whereas fertile bottom lands may never be transferred to women.

Once access is gained their is a transfer of a bundle of rights. Shipton and Goheen (1992) and Bruce and Migot-Adholla (1994) provide a useful introduction to characterizing rights, distinguishing among rights to use land and rights to transfer land. Use rights may be exclusive, with the rights-holder able to exclude all other uses of the land, should she wish, or 'diluted', with the rights-holder having only a narrow ability to use the land (such as rights to collect tree products, or a right to farm but not to plant trees, a right retained by another owner- thus, as Schroeder (1993) explains, once the trees are grown the ground is shaded and the right to plant crops becomes meaningless). Transfer rights are typically limited for women; they usually cannot designate an heir, sell land, or lend land to others. To these we may add the security of these rights, in the sense of characterizing the probability that use and transfer rights will continue through time. Security, as has been pointed out repeatedly in the sources used in this paper, depends on status. Rights end with divorce, with widowhood, with failure to have sons. Sometimes rights improve with the length of marriage, or time of cultivation of a particular plot for an unmarried woman.

A listing of rights and rules is not enough. Researchers will find a deeper methodological problem in characterizing tenure systems when the goal is to explain variation at the system level. Given a list of rules and rights, some procedure must be found to aggregate them in a way that renders comparison meaningful. The quantitative importance of forms of access must be assessed. A social group may have several forms of access that guarantee extraordinary rights and security to women (female-to-female inheritance, for example) but land acquired in this manner may constitute only a tiny fraction of the area under cultivation (by women or by the entire social group). The permanent right, transmittable and exclusive, to a kitchen garden is certainly not a sufficient indicator of an impressive tenurial status for women.

Here at least three kinds of measurements are important: (1) the value of land acquired by women, which depends on the size and quality of fields; (2) the incidence of different categories of women (married, unmarried, younger, older) who may activate the various forms of access; and (3) the probabilities of events that determine the security of a given form of access. The first kind of number is hard to estimate in an environment without market prices. The second kind of number is not difficult to collect and seems to be important; Hakansson (1988) shows, for example, how dramatic changes in the incidence of marriage changed the overall tenurial status of women from a favorable state where almost all women married and were given use rights to an unfavorable state where few women married and thus could not obtain land. The third kind of number is exceedingly difficult to measure: the chance that a woman will become divorced and lose her rights⁽²⁷⁾; the chance that she will be widowed before she has sons (a chance which changes as she is able to exercise a right to women-to-women marriage); the chance that sons will honor their mother's desire to continue to farm (e.g. Besteman 1995); the chance a brother of a deceased husband will evict her.

Thus the tenure system at a given time for a given social group consists of a set of forms of access to kinds of land for different categories of females. Each form of access conveys a particular bundle of use and transfer rights under certain conditions and time periods. Each form of access has a particular level of incidence across the population. Figure 1 present basic examples of this characterization; in general and for two different stylized systems.

There have been very few attempts to specify the full range of a land tenure system quite so systematically, for purposes of conducting quantitative investigations. The examples are papers analyzing how individual variation in tenure status explains agricultural practices or outcomes. Matlon (1994), for example, bases his analysis on six forms of access, illustrated in Figure 2.

ii. Exogenous variables

The paper has already discussed many of the exogenous factors responsible for transformations in local systems off tenure. Changing values of land (from new crops, improved transport, remittance income available for investment, land degradation, population growth, new techniques and inputs) and changing government action figure prominently. Less discussed have been changes associated with differential schooling of girls and boys and differential urbanization of girls and boys. Another relevant factor will surely be the demographic implication (in terms of the gender ratio) of AIDS and other public health issues. Rural mobility caused by refugee movements and ongoing migrations change tenure systems indirectly- by changing land values- and directly- by introducing new tenure systems and new authorities. Finally, for the sociologically inclined, changes in attitudes towards tradition and modernization may create new forms of access for women.

iii. Towards the Generation of Hypotheses

Data scarcity on a continental scale would seem to preclude testing of hypotheses at this point in time. Besides, it is not necessarily clear what the hypotheses should be. In this section we offer some thoughts on approaches that may generate hypotheses aimed at explaining changes in tenure status, by briefly discussing two interesting changes in tenure status that do not have simple explanations.

Suppose the goal were to explain one of the big mysteries of agrarian gender relations: why whenever a new crop comes along that raises the value of land, the tenure status of women seems to decline. The usual 'explanation' for this change is that men 'take over'. To an observer of the animal kingdom, this kind of 'taking over' seems entirely natural; to the victor belong the spoils, after all. But if tenure status is a social outcome in equilibrium, and a new crop is introduced that initially favors the land that women control, then this should raise their bargaining power, not lower it! We should see the tenure status of women improve (to the extent that tenure co-moves with a more general notion of status).

There are numerous examples where the value of a crop considered to be female increases, and instead of women taking advantage of this change in relative bargaining power, men take advantage of it. (This suggests a problem for attempts to raise the welfare of women through technical change in 'their' products.) Coquery-Vidrovitch (1994:109-10) gives two examples. Men in Benin abandoned the production of yams in favor of oil palms and it became a women's crop. Women appreciated the superiority of cassava, and began to replace yams with cassava; but later men again asserted control with the availability of new techniques for processing cassava. Women, she asserts, also were responsible for cocoa growing in Cameroons. In the space of a decade it became "une affaire d'hommes."

Consider another problem: We have seen how in Ghana cocoa- and other changes- led, over the years, the corporate matrilineage to define 'female property' as not including land. Furthermore, much male-controlled property came to be defined as 'self-acquired'. For purposes of land ownership, men stepped out of the lineage, women were folded into the lineage. In Kenya, on the other hand, the process saw men validating the control of the lineage over all land- they played up the notion of mbari land, and women tried- like Otieno's widow- to claim that property was self-acquired and outside the purview of the lineage.

Why is women's tenure status not improving when they receive a little boost from a new crop? Either the measurement of tenure status is wrong, or more is changing than just the introduction of a crop. We have endeavored to point out that focusing on rights alone may certainly mask an improvement in tenure status. With the introduction of cocoa, women may lose rights to transmit and inherit cocoa farms. But at the same time, the incidence of controlling 'food farms' may expand greatly, outweighing the initial negative effect. We also noted the greater incidence of land purchase among matrilineal female cocoa farmers reflecting greater tenure insecurity in the 'traditional' system. Women's insecurity in that domain led them to expend considerable resources in very secure land purchase. So it is important to measure and aggregate all forms of access to land.

More importantly, the introduction of a crop is an innovation often accompanied by other, more subtle, changes that affect the costs and benefits to exercising and renegotiating rights. The new crop raises the benefits to men to exercise and renegotiate rights, that is clear. But it also raises the benefits to women, and it has the immediate effect of raising their ability to exercise and renegotiate rights. Other institutional changes have the effect of raising the benefits to men much more than to women; the government offers a registration program only to men, inputs only to men, credit only to men, training only to men. It discourages women from contesting court decisions. It only educates men, so only they can contest cases in formal hearings. Embracing all of these separate changes may enable us to distinguish why two groups- Ghanaian matrilineages and Kenyan mbari evolve in different ways as men and women strategize to secure their control over land. There are likely to be many simultaneous exogenous changes that alter the costs and benefits of exercising and renegotiating rights.

7. Empirical strategies for studying women's tenure status

This section gleans from the literature some important observations regarding empirical strategies.

The first lesson from the discussion above is the need to be clear about subtle definitional issues for institutional environment. It is worth quoting Gray (1964:20-21) at length for pointing out some important distinctions to be made when characterizing a social group as operating with the levirate:

When a young father dies, it leaves a young widow (or widows) who needs a new husband if she is to play her proper role in society; orphans who need the support and protection of a father; and it leaves an ambiguous situation as regards property rights and personal authority within the family group... this situation is dealt with in one of two ways. Either the estate remains intact, with the surviving family members retaining their attachment to it, and some outside (usually the deceased's brother) steps in to replace the dead husband and father; or else the survivors and their restate are merged with another family group.
 

So the levirate can be interpreted in two ways: brothers 'take over' the estate (widow inheritance) and the widow moves into another domestic group and her fields are incorporated into a general pool, or brothers 'administer' the estate (husband succession) on behalf of the widow and her children. The two possibilities will have quite different implications for a wife's willingness to invest her labor in the fields of her husband.

The second lesson is that individuals may be able to use informal, or non-institutional, strategies to secure land rights. This of course is the purpose of cultivating patron-client relations, and there are instances of women and men using these ties. Van Hekken and Van Velzen (1972:52-3) relate a conflict over land tenure in Tanzania where a widow was to lose the land she cultivated to her husband's half-brother. The 'ten house group' that rendered administrative decisions backed the half-brother, so the woman then appealed to a widely feared and very powerful man, Johan. He called the local leaders to his home and the next day the group met again, and 'reconsidered' the question; the woman retained the land. Even an organized, clear-cut system like the house-property system is subject to manipulation. Karp (1978:83) relates a dispute between two Iteso [Kenya] sons, Panyako and Wasike, over their father's decision to give Panyako, a younger son, rights to a certain piece of land. Wasike claimed that the land belonged to the heirs of his mother, as her house was built in the area and she [and he] cultivated nearby. "Panyako argued that under Iteso traditional law allocation of land is not governed by membership in a matrisegment. His father and the elders of the neighborhood and clan agreed..." The irony of the case was that in arguing and strengthening his case for paternal rights, Panyako called upon his mother's kin, especially a 'classificatory' mother's brother. Some attention should be paid, in an empirical design, to capturing some of these possible determinants of the exceptional status of these outliers.

A third lesson is that the interaction of individual action and community sharing of norms, rules and interpretations (especially of 'formal' rules) means that land use and land tenure are simultaneously determined. This simultaneity must be taken into account when estimating the determinants of tenure status. A classic example is illustrated by Schroeder's (1993) narrative detailing how men and women used tree planting as actions to alter tenure security in Gambian market gardens. The planting of trees was not caused by changed tenure status, but rather was used to change tenure status.

The fourth lesson is that there are probably significantly higher costs to studying the actions and strategies of social groups- such as women- who do not necessarily participate overtly in dominant discourses. In Swaziland, for instance, the usual interpretation of land tenure is that women have little role. A man receives land from a chief; men decide how to use land. Women are 'theoretically' not allowed to dispute about land; grievances should be addressed either to the husband's family council or the woman's natal family council. But appears to be significant divergence between this ideal representation and reality. Rose (1992:151) argues that, "... male homestead heads and chiefdom authorities" use 'harmony ideologies' "to reinforce principles of male land control and to reinforce or establish principles of female land access and use rights." Most participants in Swazi society adopt the common front that disputes are to be phrased within this discourse, which obfuscates- for the researcher- the 'real' text of statements regarding land.
 

8. Conclusions

The position of women in sub-Saharan Africa vis-a-vis land is highly variable and contentious. Most women in Africa gain rights to land through their relationships with men, as wives or kin. Others have stronger rights to allocate or alienate land. This paper summarizes the dominant systems of land holding for African women. First we examine cases where women have strong rights to land, then we focus on regional variations of the 'usual case', where women's rights are primarily limited to use, and security is dependent on marriage or residence.

In all of these systems women's traditional rights appear to erode with changing relations and forms of production. With new technologies, rising land values and government and donor interventions, the trend is clear throughout the continent: women's rights to use land, gained through husbands or kin, are exposed as secondary and diminishing. In response to these changing rights in and access to land, women have mounted both legal and customary challenges to inheritance laws, made use of anonymous land markets, organized formal cooperative groups to gain tenure rights, and manipulated customary rules using woman-to-woman marriages and mother-son partnerships. These actions have caused women to create new routes of access to land and in some cases new rights.

In this paper, we have put forward a framework for analyzing how women gain access to land, the nature of those right of access, and the incidence of women's exercising those rights. By investigating the incidence of women's exercising their rights, we can examine how norms of women's right to land are put into practice. The task is now to explain these differences of rights in land and the frequency with which women exert their rights by examining both the exogenous and endogenous factors responsible for transformations.
 

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Endnotes

1. Coquery-Vidrovitch's (1994) sweeping survey tells it well, and gives the important references.

2. Harms (1974:6), for example, notes that among the Nyanga in Zaire men who receive land from the patriarch of a motondo landholding group are called "owners of the land", while women who receive fields are called "owners of the crops". Other instances of the metaphor are Goheen (1988:93), on the Bamenda 'grassfields' of Cameroon, and Moore and Vaughan (1994:214) for northern Zambia.

3. Coquery-Vidrovitch (1994:116) reminds us that one of the primary mechanisms of this expropriation was the colonial reformulation of marriage laws, strengthening the control of elders and men, by taking a harsh view of single women- the 'femmes libres' of French Africa. See also Chanock (1985).

4. Dei (1994:132) writes that in Ghana: "In June 1985, a series of new Intestate Succession and Property Laws were promulgated by the PNDC government. PNDC Law 111-4 requires all customary marriages and family property to be registered in the courts and a clear distinction to be made between family and self-acquired property. This is to assist in the devolution of self-acquired property if a spouse dies intestate and widows and children are to be cared for. For matrilineal societies like Ayirebi, spouses and children by law are now entitled to three-quarters of the intestate property excluding family and stool property. The other quarter is allocated to the matrikin's folk in accordance with traditional customary inheritance patterns." Himonga, et al. (1990:161) note that in Zambia an Intestate Succession Act (No. 5 of 1989) "alters the rights of women - in particular, widows- and children in relation to intestate estates. The surviving spouse and children are given a right to inherit directly from the deceased spouse's or parent's estate." Wanjama, et al. (1995:81): "The introduction of freehold title resulted in increased individualized, male control over land.... In 1990, the government endeavored to rectify women's handicapped position... by issuing an administrative directive to deal with land acquisition, inheritance and disposal. It decreed that a man cannot sell the land to which he has title without the consent of his wife and children. The first child acts as the representative of all the children and must consent to the sale... daughters have a right to stop any transactions pertaining to the parents' land." For Zambia, see also Munalula and Mwenda (1995).

5. See especially Schroeder (1993), who describes the tenurial consequences of a large donor-funded project to impose and expand garden sites for 479 women in The Gambia. Leach (1992:93) mentions similar gardening projects in Sierra Leone.

6. The true irony of African land tenure is that the period of colonial rule indelibly changed 'tradition', and researchers are more and more finding that what is now considered 'tradition' to have been the partial result of 'fabrication' by white administrators and their indigenous allies. All traditions are invented, of course, so this makes the inauthenticity or authenticity of a tradition a non-starter.

7. Consider further the cautionary comment of Harms (1974:10) "While the generalization that land in Zaire is held by corporate groups is confirmed by all four cases, the nature of theses corporate groups varies widely. Among the Zande it is the chiefdom; among the Kuba it is the village. The patrilineal descent group holds land among the Nyanga, while each person has rights in a number of lineages among the Mongo... The corporate groups are not stable, but are constantly dividing, merging and shifting."

8. Robertson (1976: 123), talking more about urban women who derive most of their income from trading than about rural female farmers, observed that "... the practice of spouses owning separate property in marriage was and is recognized by the local courts, both of Ga customary and British-Ghanaian law... A woman can act on her own behalf before any court as creditor, debtor, contractor, head of lineage, administratrix of an estate, and guardian of children..."

9. Since the details and subtleties of women's access to land in areas of Sahelian West Africa are similar to those reviewed in Kevane and Gray (1996) for Burkina Faso, we will not review this literature extensively.

10. This type of tenure system is certainly not unique to West Africa. Moore (1986:200, 242) claims that women have no independent rights to land in the Chagga areas of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Smith and Stevens (1988) describe another Tanzania group, the case of Haya women, located in a coffee producing area of Tanzania. They appear to be systematically excluded by local men and the state from independent access to land. For example, female household heads who are divorced cannot use the land from the clan of their ex-husband, land they may have been farming and continue to farm, to plant coffee. Women seem never to inherit land from their fathers, and their status as widows is precarious.

11. Bazin-Tardieu (1975) notes that the same situation holds in nearby Mali.

12. The classic references are Gluckman (1950), writing about the Zulu in South Africa, and Gray and Gulliver (1964). For Kenya and Tanzania see also Moore (1986), Hakansson (1986), Davison (1988), Oboler (1985), von Bulow (1992), Okeyo (1980), Karp (1978). The system is close to what Meschi (1974:41) described for Rwanda, where the statement, "Les filles n'heritent pas du patrimoine foncier," is immediately followed by a description of widows remaining on the land and passing it to sons. Jefremovas (1991), however, argues that most Rwandan women have very little control over property, except when they become widows and may inherit from their husbands. Indeed, she adds that some women who inherit property from their husbands will claim to be acting in his name, as if he were still alive. One further note: Shipton (1992:362) suggests that wives obtain access not from their husbands but from their mothers-in-law. He offers no evidence for this intriguing possibility, other than to remark that it is possible, since women are doing most of the farming.

13. We should point out that the sources on this decline are already ten or twenty years old. So little research has been done in sub-Saharan Africa over the last several decades. The foundations for discussing changing tenure in the chaotic situations of Ghana and Sierra Leone, or Zambia during the upheaval of regime transition, are shaky indeed.

14. 'Break down' of African family structure has long been a theme in Africanist studies- Moore and Vaughan (1994:166) comment on northern Zambia that, "Divorce was reported to be on the increase by almost every commentator from the 1920s onward. There are, however, no reliable figures on increases in the divorce rate, the definition of divorce being partly dependent on the equally problematic definition of marriage."

15. Geisler (1992) describes a very similar process in southern Zambia, where women seemed to have been trapped between the competing interests of rural returned migrants and younger urban migrants, who fought over rights to establish marriages much like merchants and customers struggled over commodities. Rural elders argued that young men had to pay them for the right to marry, urban migrants claimed that marriages required no payment or obligations to kin and could be temporary. The voices of women, in this struggle that took place mostly in the corridors of colonial and then post-independence judiciaries, seem to have been completely absent. Geisler argues that by the 1980s the urban young men had won the day, and women no longer had any expectations of longer term attachment to men. For further corroborating evidence, see Brown (1989:261) on Botswana, Leach (1992:92) on Mende women in Sierra Leone, and Mulder (1995) on Kipsigi women in Kenya.

16. For a vigorous challenge to the idea that matrilineage means little, see James (1978) and Poewe (1981:47), who writes, "... men when they are subject to the ideological constraints of matriliny cannot head domestic production units because they are unable to accumulate and control a permanent labor force. By contrast, women traditionally are recognized as the focal point for wealth distribution."

17. Norms of inheritance in matrilineal societies can be intricate; Hill (1963:123) comments that, "with both Aburi and Akropong farmers...it is unusual for a man's farm to pass on his death to an elder brother; inheritance by the next younger brother is usual and it is not uncommon for property to pass through the hands of several younger brothers in succession before coming under the control of... a son of one of the deceased's sisters- the man who is often popularly supposed to be the first inheritor."

18. That there were differences in something called status were corroborated; she was able to correlate brother dominance and /or husband dominance with other features.

19. Mikell (1984:197-8) also argues that Akan peoples in Ghana had dual systems of lineage operating simultaneously. Other societies have intricate and complex patterns of bilateral inheritance. Dupire, et al. (1974). describe a complicated Serer [Senegal] bilateral system of land inheritance; unusually, men sometimes receive land from their wife's lineages.

20. See Coquery-Vidrovitch (1994).

21. In Asare's (1995:106) study area in southern Ghana, "receipt of the farm as a gift from a husband accounted for 64% of female-owned farms, while 36% of female-owned farms were acquired through inheritance."

22. It is not clear why a woman should prefer to leave land for her daughters and not her sons, they are both members of the same matri and patriline. Bukh (1979) argues why a father might not give his daughter forest land: "if the woman has children, then her own family will not allow her to use the lineage forest land, because if she plants tree crops then her children, who belong to their father's lineage and not hers, might claim her trees, and the land might in that way be lost to her father's lineage.

23. Elsewhere, Mikell (1989:125) states that in late 1960s, "the court was silent on the issue of whether female generated property belongs to the lineage and therefore to abusua-controlled positions, or to individual female heirs."

24. Hakansson (1988:119) also reports on a similar directive in the Gusii area of Kenya: "Before 1982, a husband could sell his land before his sons had reached maturity... without consulting his wife or his brothers, if the land was registered in his name. Formerly wives had no legal power to resist their husbands' sale of land. But in 1982, husbands' ability to sell land without wives' consent was curtailed when land boards controlling land sales were established in most parts of Kenya. Such boards comprise the District Officer, chiefs, ex-chiefs and councillors who review all land sales. They only allow a man to sell land with the consent of his wives and sons and then only if he retains two acres for himself and his family after the sale." Registration began in the 60's, and at present all land has been surveyed and registered.

25. Hill (1963) is the classic study on land purchase in Ghana, showing how two kinds of (male) corporate groups entered into the land market. Men from patrilineal groups typically formed land-buying companies "for the sole and commercial purpose of buying land for cocoa-growing from a vendor chief. In their dealings with one another, the company members are untrammeled by considerations of kin, they attach great importance to the fair .division of land, in accordance with the sum subscribed by each farmers" (ibid, 75). Certain matrilineal migrants organized their land-holdings quite differently, adopting what Hill calls a family land system: "The family group which buys the family land is nearly always readily distinguishable, in practice, from the company...such groups are small, are usually dominated by leaders or heads and consist...of relatives and affines only" (ibid, 75). According to Mikell (1989:101): "Women were not generally farm owners in the primarily patrilineal migrant 'companies' or the abusua [matrilineage] farms in the southern Gold Coast as described by Hill." The earliest female cocoa farm owners appear to have emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. For purchase of oil palm plantation land, see Gyasi (1994), and for cocoa in the Ivory Coast, see Hecht (1985).

26. Cheater (1990:194) writes that in Zimbabwe the chiefs and district councils allegedly refused to allow women's cooperative to obtain land.

27. Divorce is generally quite high in sub-Saharan Africa (Goody 1973). On the very high incidence of divorce among Hausa in Nigeria see Solivetti (1994). Davison (1988) reports a rather amazing fact, given the high rates of divorce in Africa; her two study communities in Western and Central Provinces of Kenya had almost no divorce.