One way to think about this is not whether land tenure existed or not, but whether it was documented or not. In places with written bureaucracies we see evidence of LT that matches LT in other parts of the world. In other places it's kept by customary memory (or griots), but there's "no evidence". I suspect where land was more valuable, productive, or under population pressure (e.g. Ethiopia), there was more incentive to codify it in a lasting way, so those places get coded as having LT. In other places (e.g. the Sahel) it was less valuable and so less likely to get documented in a lasting way, so those places get coded as having no LT, even though they do/did.
In my rural Mali experience, there is customary land ownership that goes back centuries, but none of it is written. Also none of it is enforced with legal means, despited 100 yrs of a French legal system. An outsider would come to a village and think there's no Land Tenure system with rent, sale, etc. there, but there in fact is.
partly true, the information we know about land is mostly a function of the information that people wrote about it
but its important to note that land tenure is also contingent on the laws of the state governing it, for example, in christian nubia where land tenure and land sales were essential to its administration but not for the stateless groups that replaced it after the 15th century, so someone who came to lower nubia in the 1900s would think they never had land tenure i think this applies to your example of the sahel, the states that existed there particularly sokoto had land several land tenure systems including private ownership and sales but these were governed by laws that could only be enforced if sokoto continued to exist, when it didn't, its land tenure system collapsed while ethiopia's continued
from what i read about ahmad lobbo's massina caliphate, it wouldn't be surprising that it had similar land tenure systems as sokoto (the land grant in the tarikh al-fattash is certainly a 19th century invention of the chronicle's 19th century author) but because it didn't last long., you may draw the conclusion that rural mali land has been customary "for centuries"
Thanks. Fascinating work.
One way to think about this is not whether land tenure existed or not, but whether it was documented or not. In places with written bureaucracies we see evidence of LT that matches LT in other parts of the world. In other places it's kept by customary memory (or griots), but there's "no evidence". I suspect where land was more valuable, productive, or under population pressure (e.g. Ethiopia), there was more incentive to codify it in a lasting way, so those places get coded as having LT. In other places (e.g. the Sahel) it was less valuable and so less likely to get documented in a lasting way, so those places get coded as having no LT, even though they do/did.
In my rural Mali experience, there is customary land ownership that goes back centuries, but none of it is written. Also none of it is enforced with legal means, despited 100 yrs of a French legal system. An outsider would come to a village and think there's no Land Tenure system with rent, sale, etc. there, but there in fact is.
partly true, the information we know about land is mostly a function of the information that people wrote about it
but its important to note that land tenure is also contingent on the laws of the state governing it, for example, in christian nubia where land tenure and land sales were essential to its administration but not for the stateless groups that replaced it after the 15th century, so someone who came to lower nubia in the 1900s would think they never had land tenure i think this applies to your example of the sahel, the states that existed there particularly sokoto had land several land tenure systems including private ownership and sales but these were governed by laws that could only be enforced if sokoto continued to exist, when it didn't, its land tenure system collapsed while ethiopia's continued
from what i read about ahmad lobbo's massina caliphate, it wouldn't be surprising that it had similar land tenure systems as sokoto (the land grant in the tarikh al-fattash is certainly a 19th century invention of the chronicle's 19th century author) but because it didn't last long., you may draw the conclusion that rural mali land has been customary "for centuries"