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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Debts and Trespasses: Land, Mortgages and the Ancestors in Western Kenya
Author:Shipton, Parker M.ISNI
Year:1992
Periodical:Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
Volume:62
Issue:3
Pages:357-388
Language:English
Geographic term:Kenya
Subjects:Luo
agricultural credit
customary law
land law
small farms
Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
Economics and Trade
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/1159748
Abstract:Agricultural programme planners have commonly assumed that, to adopt new crops and inputs, smalle-scale farmers need financial loans, and that private land titles help them to borrow by providing a form of collateral for mortgages. The experience of the over 2 million Luo people in Kenya shows how inappropriate this theory can be in a tropical African context. With a landholding system based on patriliny, the hosting of in-laws, and other principles, Luo tend to live among kin. They continue to justify land claims largely by labour, by the presence of ancestral graves, and by the group membership these represent. These patterns persist despite individual titling by the government since the 1950s. Financial institutions trying to foreclose on defaulters, and buyers trying then to move on to those lands, face stiff social and political resistance, sometimes violent. The government land register obsolesces, and double-dealing proliferates. The mortgage system breaks down. Other problems in exogenous finance are legion. Credit means debt. It also means patronage, at international, national, or local levels. Neither public nor private financial institutions have overcome the great cultural, political, or pragmatic difficulties of lending to small farmers for staple food cropping or most other farm activities. The promise of more loans, the most commonly cited justification for freehold tenure, proves largely illusory in western Kenya. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. in English and French.
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