Land Shortage, Customary Law, and Smallholders

Land Shortage, Customary Law, and SmallholdersLand is a key asset for most people in rural Malawi.To have access to and control over land is crucial for constructing their livelihood strategies.This chapter seeks to clarify the interrelationship between people's strategies to obtain land rights on the one hand, and indigenous land tenure systems and customary inheritance rules on the other.The chapter highlights both flexible and strict applications of land tenure systems and inheritance rules in land transactions.These different applications are influenced by many factors such as the degree of land scarcity, life history of residents, and various strategies adopted by farmers to secure access to land.The complex nature of actual land transactions implies that oversimplified views of land tenure systems and inheritance rules based on a matrilineal/patrilineal dichotomy or a unidirectional evolutionary perspective may be misleading. 1 Debates on Customary Land Law in AfricaCustomary law (including customary land tenure and inheritance rules) in Africa attracted much interest from early British colonial officials and anthropologists because it provided the ideological underpinnings for colonial rule.Many of the customary laws were studied and their fundamental principles (as anthropologists understood them) were published.In some cases, these studies led to the codification of customary law through the writing of a single,