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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Ideology and ownership in West Nile |
Author: | Gingyera-Pinycwa, A.G.G. |
Year: | 1968 |
Periodical: | Transition: A Journal of the Arts, Culture and Society |
Volume: | 7 |
Issue: | 35 |
Pages: | 43-45 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Uganda |
Subjects: | customary law land law |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/2934689 |
Abstract: | The question of land ownership in traditional Africa furnishes an excellent example of an area where facts seem to have long since given way to imagination and assertions that no one ever bothers to question. Except for Buganda, for which A.B. Mukwaya has treated the question 'Who owned land in traditional Africa?' seriously in his 'Land Tenure in Buganda', and has showed the complexity of the appropriate answer, the prevalent answer to the question of land ownership has been that land was 'communally owned'. In his book 'Not Yet Uhuru', Oginga Odinga gives a view about land ownership which, like many other general assertions about Africa, seems to be both simplistic in its formulation and overly sweeping in its geographical application in as far as it is taken to apply to the whole of the continent. This article re-examines the question, not from a broad perspective, but in terms of a small village, Pacago, in the West Nile District of Uganda. The findings, from the author's own observations, seem to call for a reconsideration of the pet view about land ownership in traditional Africa. (See also J. Obol-Ochola, Ideology and tradition in African land tenure, in: E. Afr. Jl., 6 (1969), 5, p. 35-41.) |