Legal but Illegitimate: Land-Titling and Elections

A man and his wife(ves) live on one plot of land in the traditional African society as part of a community. They move either onto the land of the woman’s family or the man’s. And there is implicit understand that they will carry on the family name. In a society that places so much on land inheritance, there is necessary discrimination against women in order to make the system work. For example: if a man of one family, who gets his land from his father, also gets a separate piece of land from his wife, then what does that family do? Daughters are given up, just as they are received, trusting that the husband’s family will provide for her and the children.

Even so, the system cannot survive as there becomes less and less land to subdivide to the sons. There is a need for a system that trades land and exchanges for other assets. In the West, we use paper to title lands, and these deeds give us ownership of land and allow us to exchange for other assets. Africans first see this method as strange, since land is their livelihood. Yet they also realize a foreigner’s wealth goes beyond land and into other assets. They use the system of titling to legally take land from the people who are out of the system, which is an illegitimate transaction- yet what is that to the legalism of today? If you can’t prove it in court, it didn’t happen.

Similarly, democratic elections are an anomaly to the African way of life. To be an elder, a respected representative of your community, was a lifelong process. You were watched from a little boy how you interacted with your age-mates, how you responded to different, challenging circumstances. The elders judged your performance, placing you in a hierarchy from an early age. Very rarely was an elder a woman, varying by tribe.

Enter the elections system, which quickly became a popularity contest among the educated young and those with money. No longer is it picking who is the best for the job, but it comes from the perspective of convincing everyone else that you were the best for the job. If you weren’t the best, then what? It didn’t matter, if you got enough people to support you.

The end result is an election system that is technically legal but communally illegitimate. Parallel to this system is a traditional order that is for all intents illegal yet still very much legitimate. The election system imposed on the people attempts to make the legal legitimate, rather than going to the already legitimate to make it legal.

Perhaps the best example would be the description Hernando de Soto gives about land titling. The government should issues deeds to people with land based on their own communal understanding of how the land has been demarcated. While unofficial according to the government records, they are highly accurate according to community consensus. Instead of using the system as a means to exploit those left on the outside, they are bringing them inside to work from within. This in turn will open up the poor to the larger markets of capitalism.

Some may say that this “open road” would allow for further exploitation of the poor. Perhaps, yet they are already being exploited outside of the system, and we should at least give them a fighting chance from within.