Land Tenure in Ibo Village in South-Eastern Nigeria

M. M. Green

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This material on land tenure forms part of the date. collected during two tours in Nigeria, between 1934 and 1937, while the author was the holder of a Leverbulme Research Fellowship for anthropological work among the Ibo people.

IV
OWNERSHIP TENURE IN UMUEKE AGBAJA

i) The landowning groups.

There are, as we have said, various tenures on which land can be held. But, with one exception, it can only be owned by the right of inheritance. The exception is that land held on pledge from one generation to another and unclaimed till all evidence of its original provenance is lost, comes to be looked on as the property of the heir or heirs of the man who originally obtained it on pledge. Apart from this the ownership of land is based on ancestral right.

A study of this ownership shows that the communal system which popular imagination associates with primitive societies, whereby a large number of people hold their land in common, is practically non-existent in Umueke Agbaja. There are, it is true, one or two small pieces of bush sacred to the chief village deities on which no one would ever farm. Thus, though I found no very definite theory of their ownership, they were, in practice, reserved for the community. And the same might be said of the small bit of bush in the centre of Agbaja, sacred to the original ancestors. I was also told that the ground where Agbaja used to expose its corpses before the Europeans introduced burial belonged to all Agbaja. Formerly no one would farm on it. Now however it is farmed by the villages near.

But generally speaking land is not communally owned by any large unit such as a village or village group. Nor does any of it lie about not belonging to anyone. It is divided up among small numbers of kinsmen, members of an extended family. The extended family of a house group is normally broken up into a number of smaller landowning groups each consisting of anything from one to half a dozen or more close male relatives some of whom may be children. The lines of division of the landowning groups follow those of kinship, the members of a group being more closely related to each other than to those of another group. This will be seen by reference to the genealogical tables of extended families A.B.C. and D at the end¹.

1. See infra pp, 38–41.

The whole of the extended family may often still own a tract of land in common known as their ALA OZUZU ͻHA (.˙..˙. .) but except for this the landowning groups own their land independently.

Women do not own land. The village is an exogamous unit and a woman after marriage lives in her husband’s village.

I never saw or heard anything to suggest that any right of ownership over the land was vested in any one who might be compared to a chief in other African societies, nor even in the council of elders of the village. When one reflects how control over the land, for instance in such matters as eviction, is one of the attributes and bases of chiefly power in some parts of Africa¹, one realises how the absence of any such centralised control of the land accords with, and reacts on, the democratic, pluralistic nature of Ibo social organisation. Ownership and control of the land are dispersed rather than concentrated, just as is authority in general social affairs.

1. See L.P.Mair. ‘Chieftainship in Modern Africa, Vol.IX.No.3, p.308.

It is, however, of the utmost importance to realise that though there is no large scale communal ownership of land there are none the less certain fundamental customary restrictions with regard to land. Europeans who have been used to thinking that African land tenure is communal are apt, when they find that this is only the case in a modified sense, to go to the other extreme and think that a state of complete individual ownership with the right sale has practically been reached. This is, however, far from the facts. In the first place, though an individual may have considerable freedom of action with regard to the land - how much will emerge in the later discussion of various types of tenure - he nevertheless has co-owners whose rights cannot be ignored. In the second place the sale of land, as distinct from pledging and leasing, is unequivocally forbidden by native law and custom. This was stoutly asserted not only for Umueke Agbaja but by my Mbieri interpreter about his own large village group, and he insisted that the law was universal among Ibo people. Land cannot be lost” he said. Any assumption therefore by Europeans that land can be sold would cut right across one of the most fundamental bases of native society. The only title to permanent ownership of land is inheritance and even that title does not give the right to alienate the land irrevocably.

ii) Use of the Land. Apportionment for farming.

Speaking very roughly one can say that the land owned by the land-owning groups of an extended family tends to lie to some extent near the dwellings of the extended family. But it is not one compact area. If the house group has been moved, as is often the case, much of its land may be some distance away. It will also have many scattered plots some of which may, at some former time, have been acquired on pledge and have lapsed by default into its possession. The accompanying map of the land of the Umueke-ama division of Umueke, incomplete though it is, gives some idea of the way in which the land of even a small area is cut up and scattered about between different owners.

The chief boundary marks between the land of different owners are isolated trees. I have never in Umueke seen the low, earthed up ridges that sometimes in Owerri are used to delimit land.

Land is owned, as we have seen by small groups of kinsmen. But though the members of a group have certain communal rights over their land they do not form a common economic unit for the farming or the working of it. This is not the place to enter upon a description of farming nor of the reciprocal rights and duties of kinsfolk, but land tenure remains an empty concept without some brief description of how the land is used.

It would roughly be true to say that each man farms his share of the land himself and owns the produce himself. He may, and often does, call in a party of relatives or friends to help with the heavy work of bush clearing or hoeing and in return helps them another day. But this is merely a voluntary party and may or may not consist of other members of the land owning group. There is cooperative work between children and parents and between husbands and wives. But even so a husband and a wife will each own their crops individually and a man’s son, as soon as he begins to grow up, will be given yams by his father and own his small crop though he will still help his father in farm work and give him palm wine on regular days. He will also until he marries be to a considerable extent fed by his mother.

So individual is the ownership of crops that members of the same land owning group will not only, as is customary, store their yams in separate divisions of the same OBA (˙.) - yam barns - but will sometimes have separate yam barns. These may even be away from their own house group and in some one else’s. I knew one man of Umunwaebodim who owned land in common with two brothers of the same mother. But he stored his yams right away from theirs in the jam barn of a friend in Umueke-ama. And D⁸ stored his yams away from his own land owning group and together with those of a⁴. If therefore the land owning unit is small the unit which farms the land and owns the crops is smaller still, being really no more In the latter case than the individual. One should however add the qualification that the individual has certain customary obligations, such for instance as that of a woman to use her crops for feeding her husband and children and the husband to use his in helping to entertain guests.

Except for the garden outside the house, which the householder and his wife cultivate year after year, land is, in accordance with general Ibo custom, farmed for one season only and then allowed to go back to bush for a time, different land being cleared and farmed the following season.

One noticed in Umueke that when bush was cleared at the beginning of the farming season, though several people might clear adjacent plots, the tendency on the whole was for the new farms to be scattered about and not collected together in large areas as, for instance, in Owerri village group. I do not know how much consultation there was between the different lana owning groups or even between all the members of one group as to where farming should be carried out in any one year. Such accounts as I got of farming arrangements did not mention any conferring except between father and sons or between full brothers in a group and I did not press the matter further. I quote some accounts that I was given, of concrete situations. One cannot of course generalise from any particular case and in things Ibo there is usually a considerable margin of variation. But one will gain an idea of the lines along which custom runs.

One sees for instance from the first two examples that custom regulates to some extent the areas within which the various members of a land owning group will farm at any time. There will not be a haphazard choice at the beginning of every season. The other examples show degrees of consultation between certain members of the landowning group at the beginning of each season. In the landowning group C¹ - C⁴ of extended family C, (A told me that as he and his brothers and C³ had a different father from C⁴, their fathers being dead, they would continue to farm where their own father used to cultivate and C⁴ would do likewise.¹ Thus although they all held their land in undivided ownership their use of it was restricted by following the use of their respective fathers.

1. See table p. 40.

If two or more men of the group are sons of the same father, the father being dead, they will, generally speaking, farm the land on which their respective mothers used, in the father’s lifetime, to plant their crops, though they may sometimes agree to alter this plan. The arrangement is one of custom - OMGNALA - (.˙..) not of law - IWU (.˙), said my informant, distinguishing clearly between the two, as people so often did.

Reference is made later to the way in which wives plant certain of their crops among their husband’s yams. It is in places farmed thus that their sons will afterwards plant. It is because of this custom of farming on land where his dead mother used to plant crops that a man will sometimes say that he is planting on his mother’s land. Until one grasps the custom one wonders what he means, since women do not own land. Here, as often with reference to land, it is easy to be misled by taking words at their literal face value.

In the case of the land owning group the group contained a father, D⁵ - D¹⁰ a group contain a father, D⁵, with three sons, D⁸, D⁹ and D¹⁰, old enough to farm for themselves. D⁸, who was the only married son, told me that each year he and his brothers ask their father where they may farm and he tells them, except in the case of the bit of land immediately outside his own house which is his garden and which he knows he can plant each year. It is customary that sons who have a father alive should have their land for farming allotted to them thus by him.

As between sons of the same mother, she and the father being dead, there seemed to me to be no rigid rule. In the landowning group D⁵ - D¹⁰ of extended family D, the wife of D⁷, whom I met farming with her husband one day, told me that all the members of the group just farm where they like each season without asking anyone i.e; without consulting the eldest member or each other. She then added that the piece of land I saw them hoeing then was regularly farmed by her husband every few years and none of the others would challenge his use of it. In other words her first remark evidently had to be understood in the light of her second - that customary use would temper the freedom of each to go where he liked. Later I asked A⁸, the son of A⁷’s elder brother D⁵, whether D⁷ could dear land anywhere he liked at the beginning of each farming season without consulting his elder brother D⁵. He said that he would consult D⁵. The discrepancy between the view of D⁸ and that of the wife of A⁷ is obviously due to their different points of view. D⁸ would tend to stress the rights of his father D⁵ and the wife of D⁷ would equally be concerned with those of D⁷ and a difference of emphasis would result in a case where no rigid customary ruling seemed to stand.

In the other land owning group of this extended family, D⁴ told me that if his elder brother D³ were at home - he was usually away working-he would, at the beginning of the farming season, take palm wine for him and go to see him one evening, The elder brother would cook food for him and afterwards he would ask him what land he was to farm on that year. He added that he would first help his elder brother to cut bush and tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Foreword
• Contents
• I. Introduction
• II. The Village of Umueke Agbaja
• III. Mythical Basis of Rights over Land
• IV. Ownership Tenure in Umueke Agbaja
• V. Pledging Land
• VI. Letting Or ‘Showing’ Land for a Season for Farming
• VII. ‘Showing’ Land for Housebuilding
• VIII. Women and the Use of the Land
• IX. Summary of Salient Points with Regard to Land Tenure in Umueke Agbaja
• Genealogical Tables
• Rough Sketch Map of Village of Umueke Agbaja
• Key to large incomplete sketch map (separate) of land holdings in Umueke-ama division of Umueke Agbaja