Capitalism
In present-day Africa, there are large economic opportunities connected to access to customary land. For instance in Ghana, where the customary sector holds almost 80 percent of the land (Alden Wily and Hammond 2001, 46-48), theexpansionofurban residentialareasand thedevelopment of new commercial export agricultural sectors resulted in new land pressures and commoditisation of customary land.
The changing value of land has led to struggles to redefine customary land tenure, which have increasingly concentrated control of land revenues in the hands of chiefs (Amanor 2001, Ubink 2008a). Alden Wily and Hammond (2001, 44) speak of the “feudalization of land relations.” Kasanga and Kotey (2001, 18) call the displacement of poor and marginalised families from their land “a national disease.”The extractive industry also has a profound impact on customary land dynamics. For instance in South Africa, mining—the country's biggest foreign income generating sector—is largely situated in the former homelands, on customary land. Several studies show how chiefs and elders increasingly control the interactions between mining corporations and the ‘traditional communities' they formally represent. They enter into mining contracts and receive and control vast mineral revenues, while community members lose access to land and are confronted with pollution (Manson 2013; Mnwana and Capps 2015, 6).
State law and governance have a profound impact on these local struggles over land and its proceeds. Recent legislation, as well as current draft legislation in South Africa, centralises the position of senior traditional leaders without defining the responsibility and accountability of these chiefs vis-a-vis their people, or checks and balances on their functioning. Furthermore, Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) measures demand as a certain percentage of shares to be held by ‘formerly disadvantaged South Africans', which opens up investment opportunities for wealthy South Africans and ‘traditional communities' (Claassens and Matlala 2014).
Traditional authority in the platinum belt of South Africa is increasingly taking on a formal legal structure, in which ‘the community' becomes a BEE shareholder in the mine, and the senior traditional leader and his council act as CEO and management board. This “corporatization of traditional authority” (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), BEE deals and other lucrative mining deals go a long way to explain the “trilogy of corruption,” as Boyle calls it, between “traditional authorities, political elite and mining houses, almost everywhere mining takes place on communal lands in South Africa.”3Studies from other areas of Africa describe similar processes of commodification of land and provide mounting evidence of increasingly restricted and insecure access to land for the poor majority and increasing inequity in the face of land shortage and competition (Alden Wily 2003; Bruce 1988; Swindell and Mamman 1990; Boone and Duku 2012). In sum, the literature displays that customary systems often evolve inequitably when large-scale economic opportunities arise.