Re-enchanting the World by Silvia Federici Peter Linebaugh

Author:Silvia Federici,Peter Linebaugh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2019-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Women, Customary Law, and the Masculinization of the Commons

As it is the case today, in precolonial times, customary laws gave men priority with regard to landownership and management, on the assumption that women would eventually marry and leave the clan and the clan’s land should be protected.19 Thus, despite variations, depending on whether the system was matrilineal or patrilineal and other historical and cultural factors, even in precolonial times, women had access to land through their relations with husbands and kin. ‘Ownership,’ however, had a very different meaning than in statutory law, as customary law worked “on a principle of inclusion” rather than exclusion.20 The owner had the right of occupancy and held the land in trusteeship for the other members of the family, including the generations to come. Ownership did not confer absolute proprietorship nor the right to sell. Thus, either through their own families or through their husbands, women always had fields of their own, their own crops, and controlled the income they earned from the sale of the produce they farmed.21

Things changed, however, with the commercialization of agriculture and the beginning of production for the international market. As a rule, the more the demand for land has increased, the stricter the “constraints [placed] on women’s access to it.”22

Several strategies have been used for this purpose. In parts of East Africa, men have refused to pay the bride price, opting for marriage by elopement, which makes it easier for them to dissolve the relationships with their wives and refuse them any transfer or donation of land. A study conducted in Gusii land in Southwestern Kenya, showed that by the 1980s, 80 percent of marriages in that area were by elopement, with the consequent creation of “a whole category of landless women,” something unprecedented in the region.23 A similar study found that in a Rwandan village, in the late 1990s, two-thirds of the couples had married without the payment of the bride price, again a proof that rural women are losing one of their main forms of protection, for without this payment they have no claim to land and can be asked to leave their husbands’ homes at any time.24

Another tactic used to deny women’s land rights has been the redefinition of what constitutes kinship and, therefore, who ‘belongs’ to the clan and who does not. As the recent conflicts in Kenya’s Rift Valley have shown, the politics of ‘othering’ and ‘belonging’ have been used to expel different ethnic or religious groups from the land. But the same politics have been used to curtail women’s access to land, by defining wives as outsiders and nonfamily members. Witchcraft accusations—the ultimate ‘othering’ strategy—have served this purpose.25 In Mozambique, in recent years, women who have demanded their deceased husbands’ land or their share of the crops have been accused of being witches and of having murdered their husbands to inherit their belongings.26

Lands and crops too have been reclassified—along with increases in their monetary values—to demonstrate that men have unique title to them.27

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