Carola Lentz's Land, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa is an authoritative account of land politics in the Black Volta Region, where Ghana meets Burkina Faso in the West Africa savannah. In an analysis that spans the longue durée of the last three centuries, Lentz explains precisely how land rights are closely intertwined with other economic rights, ethnicity, political representation and political power in this region, and how the substantive meanings over these connections have been constant or changed over time. She carefully builds four arguments that challenge conventional paradigms that underpin much political and policy analysis of contemporary Africa.

The first is that because land is abundant, there is little or no sense of property in African societies. According to this conventional wisdom, if there are strong land claims in Africa, then they are anchored in religion or deep ancestry, not contemporary power relations. The second paradigm is that political power in Africa is gathered by asserting control over persons, not over land or territory. Conventional wisdom holds that there is an indifference to territoriality per se in African societies. Third is the paradigm that says that because national boundaries are arbitrary, national territory does not correspond to political community and political communities do not have territories. Political community is held together by personal ties. The fourth paradigm is that agricultural peoples and communities are fixed in space. The mobility that is important in understanding contemporary Africa is rural-to-urban migration (or circular migration for work in mines or seasonal labour), not movements of agrarian settlement.

Lentz challenges each of these ‘influential misperceptions’ or school-book accounts of history head-on. The implications of her analysis for understanding African politics are far-reaching. If political communities can be rooted in territorial control, if social hierarchy and political power can be rooted in land-holding, and if there is competition between and within agrarian societies over property and territory, then we have the makings of political analyses that differ starkly from the patrimonial-networks and identity-politics analyses that now dominate much of the literature.

Careful research design and case justification, and probing of arguments with detailed empirical material, make Lentz's arguments compelling for political scientists as well as the social and economic anthropologists and historians who make up much of the natural constituency for this impressive study. The geographic focus is an area of ‘massive agricultural expansion’ since the mid-18th century of a segmentary society, now known under the ethnonym of Dagara, into lands first settled and claimed by ‘Sisala’ agriculturalists. It is a ‘least likely case’ for finding perennial and intensifying struggles for control over property and territory for several reasons: population densities are low in the West African savannah; land scarcity per se did not bite into agricultural communities until recent decades; the Black Volta region is a backwater that stands in stark contrast to cash-crop economies in the high agricultural potential regions to the south; and the region's segmentary societies do not have the histories of political centralisation and precolonial chieftaincy that would resonate more intuitively with an argument stressing political territoriality. Yet in precisely this region, Lentz finds histories of assertion and contestation of political and economic control over land that go back over 250 years, pre-dating colonial rule with its imposition of chieftaincy, ethnicisation of land rights, and rising land scarcity and land values. Explaining what has changed and what has remained constant over time is the fulcrum of Lentz's analysis. Focus on a border region that spans the British/French colonial divide, with its differences and similarities in administrative and legal traditions, adds institutional comparisons and controls.

What has remained constant, Lentz argues, is the legitimacy of ‘first comer’ claims as the basis of landholding among all the communities of the Black Volta region, even as these claims coexist in a context of ‘legal pluralism’ that also accords legitimacy to land claims based on violent conquest and forceful occupation of the land (before colonial rule), sweat equity and user rights, spiritual or ritual justifications, communal or eventually (under colonialism and thereafter) ethnic belonging, and now, national laws (which have also shifted over time). The most dramatic changes over the longue durée has been the rise of state-created chieftaincies and the concomitant ethnicisation and politicisation of landholding as (a) ‘first comer rights’ have been solidified by the state and extended to entire state-defined ‘ethnic groups’, and (b) subordinate ‘stranger’ or ‘in-migrant’ status has been frozen in place and extended to entire ‘ethnic groups’ that have been similarly labelled and codified by the modern (colonial and postcolonial) state.

There is much more to say about this subtle and carefully argued book, which is anchored in rich original case studies of micro (and macro) land politics, and in debates with other scholars of land, property, ethnicity and autochthony in Africa. My take surely reflects the preoccupations of a political scientist interested in the political economy of land and governance. There is much more for readers to learn and debate in this rich volume.