Mortgaging the Ancestors

348 Pages·2016·1.1 MB·English

Yale Agrarian Studies Series
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Peasantry, 1927–1930 (2005)
Parker Shipton, The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in
Africa (2007)
Parker Shipton, Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa (2009)
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Mortgaging
the Ancestors
Ideologies of Attachment
in Africa
Parker Shipton
Yale University Press NEW HAVEN & LONDON
Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this
book are not available for inclusion in the eBook.
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2009 by Parker Shipton.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations,
in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Set in Ehrhardt and The Sans types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shipton, Parker MacDonald.
Mortgaging the ancestors : ideologies of attachment in Africa / Parker Shipton.
p. cm. — (Yale agrarian studies series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-300-11602-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Land tenure—Africa. 2. Mortgages—Social aspects—
Africa. 3. Economic anthropology—Africa. 4. Economics—Sociological aspects. I. Title.
HD968.S55 2009
333.3'23096—dc22
2008017706
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
It contains 30 percent postconsumer waste (PCW) and is certified by the Forest Stewardship
Council (FSC).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
TO
Polly
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1
CHAPTER 2 Sand and Gold: Some Property History and Theory 23
CHAPTER 3 Luo and Others: Migration, Settlement, Ethnicity 59
CHAPTER 4 An Earthly Anchorage: Graves and the Grounding of
Belonging 85
CHAPTER 5 Birthright and Its Borrowing: Inheritance and Land
Clientage Under Pressure 109
CHAPTER 6 The Thin End: Land and Credit in the Colonial Period 130
CHAPTER 7 The Ghost Market: Land Titling and Mortgaging After
Independence 148
CHAPTER 8 Nothing More Serious: Mortgaging and Struggles over
Ancestral Land 160
CHAPTER 9 Bigger than Law: Land and Constitutionalism 201
CHAPTER 10 Conclusion: Property, Improperty, and the Mortgage 223
Notes 255
Bibliography 289
Index 315
Illustrations follow p. 73
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Preface
Human attachment—to other humans or to things—is an idea
that always contains a question. What, really, is a bond, a tie,
or a connection . . . and if it is invisible, impalpable, something just in the
minds of the ones who feel attached, or those who speak or write of them,
then is it any less real than a piece of sisal rope?
This is a study about human attachments that have no feel or texture
like twine but that would seem somehow to tie persons to other persons,
warm and breathing; and to soil and sand that have color, taste, and smell. It
is about attachments between people, and between people and things—and
what these two kinds of ties have to do with each other. In short, it is about
belonging.
People in East Africa have lately used use sisal not just to make rope but
also as a growing plant, to mark boundaries and corners of fields. They use
it not just to connect, that is, but also to divide. Some are going further and
fencing off their fields. Whether they ought to be doing this, and whether
those who lend them money ought to be attaching their land in a way that
might let them yank it away from them, is a matter of much local uncertainty
and debate. The mortgage, a new practice in the area, threatens to sepa-
rate people in rural areas from home, from kith and kin, and from ancestral
graves, with all that these mean. This is not just a local issue; it also reaches
between continents.
This is one volume of an informal trilogy written to be readable in any
sequence. The Nature of Entrustment, the first published, presents the Luo