This article examines the status of land tenure in Zimbabwe following the ‘Fast Track’ land reforms of 2000–3. It finds that post-reform land tenure remains strongly dualist, with land sales and rental prohibited on the land (about two thirds of the total) classified as ‘A1’ resettlement or ‘communal areas’, while tradeable leases apply to much of the remainder, classified as ‘commercial land’. The article draws on fieldwork in Svosve Communal Area and on previous studies on land transactions in Zimbabwe to argue that land sales and rental transactions are an enduring feature of land use in Zimbabwe's ‘communal areas’. Moreover, the article argues that, despite government prohibition, there is evidence that such transactions are being fuelled by increasing demand for land arising from the collapse in the non-farm economy in Zimbabwe. The article argues that while the logic of informal (or ‘vernacular’) land sales and rental is widely recognized by land users in communal and resettlement areas, government prohibition, in favour of asserting land allocation rights of customary authorities, is driven by considerations of political control of the rural vote.

This article explores the ways in which efforts to expand private land tenure, coupled with the continued centrality of customary land administration in Zambia, produce a fractured system of land governance in which localized markets for land emerge but are forced to operate in a clandestine manner. Using ethnographic and archival data sources, I argue that despite the historical and contemporary relationship between land rights and economic ‘development’, the clandestine nature of land markets in rural Zambia tends to (re)produce many of the social ills that ‘development’ seeks to resolve. Using a case study of a clandestine market for land in a Tonga-speaking region of southern Zambia, this article shows how these markets undermine women's rights to land, while allowing for the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few.

The article traces the history of debates on land transfers in northern Ghana and discusses the ways in which African and European views on land tenure influenced and instrumentalized each other. Using the case of Nandom in the Upper West Region, I analyse how an expansionist group of Dagara farmers gained access to and legitimized control over land previously held by a group of Sisala hunters and farmers claiming to be the ‘first-comers’ to the area. Both groups acknowledge that the Sisala eventually transferred land to the Dagara immigrants, symbolically effected by the transmission of an earth-shrine stone. However, the Sisala interpret this historical event in terms of a ‘gift’, invoking the language of kinship and continued dependency, while the Dagara construe it in terms of a ‘purchase’, implicating exchange, equality and autonomy. These different perspectives, as well as colonial officials' ideas that land ownership was ultimately vested in the ancestors of the first-comer lineage and therefore ‘inalienable’, have shaped early disputes about the Nandom earth shrine and Dagara property rights. Competing conceptions of pre-colonial African land tenure continue to provide powerful arguments in current land conflicts, and shrinking land reserves as well as the political implications of landed property, in the context of decentralization policies, have exacerbated the debate on the ‘inalienability’ of land.

The article offers an empirical perspective regarding customary land sales in Côte d'Ivoire, focusing on their socio-political embeddedness as well as on the implications of such processes for the content of the rights and duties transferred. Two interlinked aspects of land transfers, which usually come together in African contexts, are to be taken into account: rights and obligations regarding land access and control (‘the land resource dimension’), and rights and obligations regarding group membership, and more generally the socio-political dimensions that condition the social recognition and effectiveness of the transfer of land rights (‘the socio-political dimension’). These two dimensions are empirically explored, together with the processes of their connection and possible disconnection/reconnection. We show that the diverging interpretations of land transfers, from emic as well as from etic viewpoints, do not necessarily correspond to mutually exclusive explanatory models, or to a simple transition phase from customary to ‘pure’ market land transfers. Access to land may become commoditized without extinguishing the socio-political dimension of land transactions. Another point is that the articulation of these two dimensions of land transfers is a specific and always contextualized issue. This has direct consequences on the legitimacy of land transfers as well as on the security of the stranger right holder within the local community and more generally on the politicization of land issue.

It is argued that land shortage and the decline of new frontier areas results in increasing conflicts over rights to land and to labour. This constrains land sales and agricultural land becomes increasingly transferred though sharecropping and the commodification of user rights in land, rather than through the evolution of clearly defined land markets. Smallholder agriculture increasingly becomes an individual undertaking, in which labour is hired, and rights to land are acquired rather than allocated within the family. Agricultural relations of production become increasingly commodified and the moral economy of the family is undermined and increasingly socially differentiated. The article traces historically the emergence of these production relations in south-east Ghana.

This article is a contribution to reflection on the question of land markets in Africa. Based on a case study of Abure society (Côte d'Ivoire), the article emphasizes, first, the relation between the intra-family dimension of land rights and the functioning of the land lease market. Particular attention is paid to intra-family land tensions induced by the land lease market, and their repercussions in the form of inter-community conflict reflecting the ethnic-national basis of the land lease market (with autochthonous Abure lessors and Burkinabe tenants). Second, emphasis is placed on the socio-political dimension of land tenancy relationships. The article is based on a deciphering of the land rights and land tenure practices within Abure family groups, and of a 2001 conflict which set Abure young men against Burkinabe pineapple growers. Beyond the inter-community conflict surrounding land, the article reveals an intergenerational conflict within Abure society itself between social juniors and the elders who manage family land, regarding the delegation of rights to lease out family land and the distribution of land lease (rental) income.