Introduction: The social reproductive question of land contestations in Africa

Abstract

THE CONTEMPORARY PERIOD OF A RAGING GLOBAL PANDEMIC has reasserted the significance of land and landed resources as the basis for social reproduction in agrarian societies. Due to coronavirus disease 2019, millions of poor and working-class households everywhere and especially in the Third World are faced with the question of survival: That is, how to meet their minimum daily consumption needs in the absence of adequate state support and wages. This question, regarding the basis of social reproduction, finds a varying range of responses in different social and political contexts. In the agrarian south, land attains significance not merely as a productive resource but primarily as the basis for the reproduction of working people, including the peasantry, petty commodity producers, and wage labourers, for whom the state and market are insufficient providers under capitalism. Land relations in Africa and the contestations which accompany them and precipitate reforms of law and tenure therefore need to be understood concretely in relation also to social reproduction, for which land plays a central function in agrarian societies. This introduction adopts such a lens in relation to the land contestations that this issue highlights in various Africa countries, asking how a feminist agrarian critique concerned with the social reproductive basis of land would respond to the thematic concerns that include legal formalism, communal tenure, rural transformation and land dispossession. This chapter thus is primarily interested in the questions raised through land claims and contestations, which highlight the social reproductive basis of land in the global south.