Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon
Pages: 422
Year: 2012
Category: Anthropology, Social Sciences
Dimensions: 229 x 152 mm
Everyday Practices and Relations in Peri-urban Blantyre, Malawi
This book explores the changing land relations in the peri-urban villages of Blantyre in Malawi. It questions and debates how and why the peri-urban villages have become the locus of the selling and buying of customary land, the practices and also the relations involved. The book provides rich ethnographic insights on the commodification of land relations, custom, practices, disputes and social relations between land sellers, land buyers, traditional leaders, and intermediaries. The transactions draw strength from the growing peri-urbanization and monetization of social relations, both of which push towards land decisions at family and individual levels. Bigger groups like the village, clan or extended family have minimal, if not symbolic role only. Village headmen benefit materially by taking gifts (signing fee) rationalized by custom on reciprocity, while estate agents claim commission. Numerous constraints are negotiated about the ownership, rights to sale, multiple selling and the use and sharing of land money. Peri-urban land transactions offer scope for examining a wider range of social and economic relations, and the subtle ways in which the state infiltrates the everyday lives of actors. Overtime, the practices reproduce but also transform land relations in significant but less appreciated ways.
£57.00
About the author
Ignasio Malizani Jimu received his PhD from Universität Basel, Switzerland, in 2011. Prior to that he received the Master of Arts in Development Studies (University of Botswana) and a Bachelor of Education (University of Malawi). He is author of Urban Appropriation and Transformation (Langaa 2008), several journal articles and book chapters on development theory and practice, among others. Since 2009 he has held the position of associate professor of geography in Mzuzu University, where he serves as head of department.
Review
“The new Cameroon envisaged by Godfrey Tangwa in his Rotcod Gobata column is one free of political demagogy, double standards, stoogery and sycophancy. It should be a Cameroon where people are moved by principle and love of country, not propelled or remote-controlled by the whims and caprices of self-serving dictators and schizophrenics, or worse still, by their foreign paymasters and overlords. It should be a Cameroon void of censorship, even the symbolic; a Cameroon where there are no political inquisitions, and where no one is forced underground or into exile because of his or her opinions and beliefs. The new Cameroon should be truly democratic, not on paper but in fact.”.
Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cape Town, South Africa
“A theme that draws throughout the entire thesis is the commodification of land, which simultaneously creates opportunities for some actors and disadvantages for others. Related to that is a thorough and convincing questioning of conventional conceptualizations, in particular the usual dichotomy of urban versus rural. Jimu’s understanding of land transactions as a practice that produces its own social space and creates its own normativity is certainly a challenge to more conventional interpretations.”
Professor Till Förster, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel, Switzerland
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