| Sharing Scarcity: Land Access and Social Relations in Southeastern Rwanda |  Printable version
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Date: 28 April 2011
Time: 15.30-17.00
Place: Room 3A06, Pieter de la Court building, Wassenaarseweg 52,
Leiden.
Speaker:
Margot Leegwater, African Studies Centre
Discussant:
Yves van Leynseele, PhD student Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen
University
You are kindly requested to register for this seminar.
More than 90% of Rwanda’s population depends on farming. However many
peasants in southeastern Rwanda are having a difficult time feeding
their families due to changes in land-tenure arrangements in the
aftermath of the 1994 genocide. These have impacted on land security and
social relations, and survivors and perpetrators of the genocide and
returned refugees have had to find a way of living together and sharing
the space available despite population pressures. This has led to
tensions and suspicions, especially as the population is confronted with
increasing land scarcity.
Local access to land and land relations have been influenced by two
government policies that were implemented in the late 1990s: (i) the
sharing of land by the Hutu population with Tutsi refugees who returned
to the region after years in exile; and (ii) the forced resettlement of
peasants from dispersed settlements in the hills to living in villages.
The social fabric in the southeastern part of today’s post-conflict
Rwanda has not yet been repaired and tensions, fear, mistrust and an
overall lack of solidarity are ever present. Ethnicity still plays an
important role, with tensions flaring up between Tutsi refugees, the
Hutu population and Tutsi genocide survivors who, despite the new
village structure, often live in separate communities.
One of Rwanda’s new and far-reaching policies is a law that states that
all land must be registered, as of 2010, and formal land titles have to
be issued. After registration, the state guarantees occupancy rights to
farmland by means of a 99-year lease. While the government argues that
the new land law will strengthen land-tenure security and reduce
conflicts, recent fieldwork in southeastern Rwanda has shown that land
conflicts within families and between neighbours have increased since
registration was introduced. By ignoring sensitivities at the local
level and rigidly implementing the new policies, the tensions in
pre-existing social relations have not decreased. As the social fabric
is still very fragile and will weaken even further as land-tenure
insecurity and land conflicts increase, there could easily be renewed
(ethnic) violence.
Margot Leegwater is an anthropologist. She is currently working on a PhD
on access to land at the local level in relation to land-tenure policies
in southeastern Rwanda. She has recently returned from her third
fieldwork period there.
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