LTC Paper Security of Tenure and Land Registration in Africa: Literature Review and Synthesis by Carol W. Dickerman with Grenville Barnes John W. Bruce Joy K. Green Greg Myers Richard Polishuk Douglas Stienbarger Andrew Sund University of Wisconsin-Madison 175A Science Hall 550 North Park Street Madison, WI 53706 http://www.ies.wisc.edu/ltc/ LTC Paper LTC Paper 137, U.S. ISSN 0084-0793 originally published in 1989 SECURITY OF TENURE AND LAND REGISTRATION IN AFRICA : LITERATURE REVIEW AND SYNTHESIS by Carol W. Dickerman with Grenville Barnes John W. Bruce Joy K. Green Greg Myers Richard Polishuk Douglas Stienbarger Andrew Sund Land Tenure Center LTC Paper 137 University of Wisconsin-Madison December 1989 CONTENTS Page Preface v Introduction vii A Historical Perspective viii The Variety of Registration Programs xiii The Range of Land Registration Situations: Some Generalizations xix Land Registration: Objectives and Experiences xxi Tne Question of Registration: Two Opposing Views xxvi The Literature Review: An Introduction xxx Africa: General 1 Francophone Africa 13 East Africa 17 Angola 21 Benin 23 Botswana 25 Burkina Faso 43 Burundi 45 Cameroon 47 Central African Republic 51 Chad 53 Congo 55 Ethiopia 57 Gabon 65 Gambia 67 Ghana 69 Guinea 77 Guinea-Bissau 79 Ivory Coast 81 Kenya 83 Lesotho 127 Liberia 135 Madagascar 139 Malawi 143 Mali 153 Mauritania 155 Mozambique 157 Namibia 159 Niger 161 Nigeria 163 Rwanda 177 Senegal 179 Seychelles 183 Sierra Leone 185 Somalia 189 iii South Africa 197 Sudan 209 Swaziland 229 Tanzania 239 Togo 247 Uganda 249 Zaire 275 Zambia 279 Zimbabwe 287 Country Identifications 301 Author Index 303 Subject Matter Index 311 iv PREFACE In 1984, the Land Tenure Center embarked on a project to evaluate the experiences with land registration and tenure reform in Africa. Had African states been able, through tenure reform and land registration, to provide greater security of tenure than was available through customary tenure systems? This literature review is one product of that four-year project on security of tenure and land registration, carried out under LTC's Cooperative Agreement (ACCESS I) with USAID's Bureau of Science and Technology. It was undertaken by Dr. Carol Dickerman with the assistance of several LTC staff and research assistants. The literature proved far more extensive than anticipated. While most of these annotations were completed in the first year of the project, additional titles have been added as the project moved into its field-research phase in Senegal, Uganda, Kenya, and Somalia. Simultaneously, a critical examination of the economic literature on these issues, by Professor Richard Barrows and Dr. Michael Roth, is being issued. These publications will be followed later this year by the four country reports and a final report. Over four hundred items are annotated here, organized by country and indexed by subject matter and author. In spite of the number, a large part of the African literature is not included; this review focuses on the literature about tenure reform, and the annotations do not include the ethnographic and other analyses of customary land tenure systems. Each country section is not simply a collection of disconnected annotations but relates the items to one another, indicating how our current state of knowledge has developed. Stu-dents of tenure reform in Africa have often in the past been overwhelmed by the sheer extent of the literature. This review and synthesis should vastly simplify their task. Dr. Dickerman's introduction examines the motives behind and impacts of tenure reform and land registration in Africa with a breadth of coverage which our earlier command of the literature had not allowed. Funding for this research was provided by AID's Africa Bureau from Strategic Studies funds and by the Bureau of Science and Technology. The Land Tenure Center appreciates the interest and support of many in AID/Washington, including David Atwood, Michael Yates, and Gloria Steele in the Bureau of Science and Technology; Pat Fleuret, Gerald Casnin, and Curt Reintsma in Africa Bureau; and Joan Atherton in PPC. We would also like to express our thanks to Jane Dennis, whose work typing, formatting, and keeping track of many separate computer files was invaluable. John W. Bruce, Project Coordinator Security of Tenure/Land Registration v INTRODUCTION by Carol Dickerman In recent years there has been renewed attention on the parts of international development agencies to land registration in Africa. Organizations such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the World Bank have become increasingly interested in the effects that registration of individual titles to rural land may have on agricultural development. Their interest in registration in many ways complements that of a number of countries in Africa which since independence have sought to formulate coherent national land-use policies. Governments in Uganda, Senegal, and Zambia, to name just a few, have been concerned to regulate landholding and monitor development within the country through the registration of rights to land. For both groups registration has been the means to establish a formal, written record of rights to land. The kinds of rights to land to be established by the process, however, have not been identical. Donor agencies have focused their attention on the creation of individual freehold title, emphasizing the heightened security of holding, marketability, and access to credit under such tenure. Na- tional governments, on the other hand, have been more concerned to see that land is used productively rather than merely accumulated for purposes of prestige or inheritance or as a hedge against inflation, and for this reason have tended to favor granting more circumscribed rights such as leaseholds or rights of occupancy. This renewed concern with land registration has generated interest in earlier programs of registration in sub-Saharan Africa and their effects. USAID has funded a program of comparative research by the Land Tenure Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and affiliated local research institutions in Senegal, Somalia, Swaziland, and Uganda. This research is assessing the impact on production and other development of a variety of attempts by the nation-state to take over from traditional land-tenure systems the provision and protection of titles. This literature review and synthesis have been prepared as part of that effort. The World Bank's Economic Research Service has been pursuing a similar program of comparative research, funded in part by USAID, in Ghana, Rwanda, and Kenya. Preliminary results are now becoming available from both these efforts and will soon increase very substantially our knowledge, especially on a quantitative level, of tenure and development relationships in Africa. The literature review which follows is an attempt to gather in one place data about the diverse efforts at land registration and to describe briefly for each country the various registration programs that have taken place (if any), why they were undertaken, and what subsequent studies of these programs have found. Among other things, it will be seen that the intended benefits, and beneficiaries, of vii land registration have changed over the century or so since the first systems were put in place. In addition to these variations over time, there are also differences among Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone countries, differences that not only influenced the structure of registration systems established during the colonial era, but also continue to inform the kinds of registration systems adopted today. A Historical Perspective The earliest facilities for.the registration of land were estab- lished in West Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Lagos (1883), Liberia (c. 1861), and Sierra Leone (1857?), provision was made for the registration of transactions in land. These three early registration systems were systems for the registration of deeds rather than titles, and thus what was recorded was the document evidencing the transaction of a particular piece of real property rather than ownership of the land itself. (Under a title registration system, registration clears and legally confirms the title acquired in a transaction or by inheritance; deeds registration has no such effect, though order of registration may determine which of two inconsistent deeds is enforced.) Deeds registration was, of course, the norm rather than the exception during the nineteenth century, but over the years, in Africa as elsewhere, it has presented various problems, especially when transactions have gone unregistered (as indeed has often been the case). Later attempts to modify the system of deeds registration in these three countries have focused on the need to convert to registration of title. A second feature of these three registries, unusual in light of later colonial experience with registration, is that they were in- tended primarily for the recording of African rights to land. Al-most all land registration systems introduced in colonial Africa before 1950--Uganda is a notable exception--were primarily intended to secure European rights to land; in these three areas, in contrast, registered property was largely African-owned. This is not as anomalous as it might seem, however: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Lagos all had significant nonindigenous African populations, foreigners whose rights to property were not governed by the customary tenure systems. There was thus a need to institute a formal system for the protection of rights to land held by these newcomers, and the result was the introduction of deed registration. Some of the registration systems instituted in the following decades, though, did not follow this pattern of registration of deeds, but rather introduced the notion of registration of title, adapting a system first instituted by Robert Torrens in Australia in the mid- 1800s. The Torrens system has clear advantages over deed registration, most notably in the creation of a land register which provides an authoritative record of landownership and thus facilitates the cheap and expeditious transfer of land without the need for professional legal assistance.