Methodology and analytical outline

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Majang zone between March and April 2021. A contested case study of land registrations is used to investigate unequal land transactions between Majang and highlanders. This study used ethnographic methods that included in-depth and semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and document analysis. I collected the interview data through purposive selections of research subjects. I selected research participants through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling (Bleich and Pekkanen Reference Bleich and Pekkanen2015). To obtain views from divergent stakeholders, twenty-eight group and twenty-six individual interviews were conducted with Majang families, community leaders, highlanders, land administration experts, and with district, zonal, regional and federal administrations. Groups with ‘traditional’ use rights to forest land, land administration experts, women, community leaders and elders were selected. In addition to group and individual interviews, I carried out in-depth key informant interviews with fifteen individuals. The interviews and focus group discussions were conducted in Majang and Amharic languages and translated into English. I used a translator for interviews and focus group discussions that were conducted in the Majang language. Proclamations, informal contracts for land sales and leases, and wider social science literature on contested land tenure regimes and ethnicity were analysed. This research involved dealing with sensitive topics connected to marginalized groups, land transactions and the tensions they provoked. Such data were carefully collected and coded around relevant ideas, concepts, questions and themes in order to maintain anonymity.

Situating specific land transactions in the Majang zone within broader debates about how land tenure regimes can structure patterns of African land conflict (Boone Reference Boone2014) promises a deeper understanding of the dynamics of land tenure and land conflict in Africa. There is a growing number of empirical studies on a variety of rental and sharecropping arrangements across the continent, where migrants have negotiated access to land for cash crop production (Holden et al. Reference Holden, Otsuka and Place2009b; Colin and Woodhouse Reference Colin and Woodhouse2010; Holden and Otsuka Reference Holden and Otsuka2014), but there are few studies that focus on disputes over the meanings of past transactions where sale/lease arrangements are ‘ambiguous’, ‘incomplete’ and socially embedded in land marketing and their political implications (Boone Reference Boone2014; Colin and Woodhouse Reference Colin and Woodhouse2010: 2; Colin Reference Colin2018; Von Benda-Beckmann Reference Von Benda-Beckmann2003). Careful discussion of the social relationships that are embedded in land deals in the Majang zone enriches our understanding of land transactions, increasing disputes, and the latent land disputes that were uncovered and provoked by the registration of land rights.

As observed by Colin (Reference Colin2018: 4), the idea that customary land is inalienable can be attributed to ‘the imperatives of social reproduction … ensuring access to the land for descendants’. In south-western Ethiopia, Majang’s strong attachment to their forested ecology is connected not only to the imperative of social reproduction but also to a ‘mythical past’ through the story of Ler, the father of all men, who ordered them ‘to cultivate, hunt and keep bees’ in their territory (Stauder Reference Stauder1971). This mythical past allowed members of Majang ancestral groups to use their territories for subsistence. The imperative of transferring land access to kin and sons imposed restrictions on transferring property rights to outsiders. Since the mid-1980s, ambiguous land transactions between Majang people and migrants have taken place outside formal legal frameworks, and have often departed from customary regimes. The implementation of land titling within the context of contrasting interpretations of past land sale/lease transactions in Gambella not only aggravated existing tensions but also generated contested meanings of ‘leased/sold’, ‘purchased’, ‘cleared’, ‘vacant’, ‘forested’ and ‘state forest’ land among Majang people, highlanders and state actors at various levels. The registration of land rights has often uncovered latent land disputes, as existing land users recognize that land rights will become fixed and definitive (Berry Reference Berry2002; Ribot and Peluso Reference Ribot and Peluso2003; Broegaard Reference Broegaard2009; Sikor and Lund Reference Sikor and Lund2009; Colin and Woodhouse Reference Colin and Woodhouse2010; Lund and Boone Reference Lund and Boone2013). In the context of legal pluralism, where different ideas of land rights coexist, interpretations of land sales can aggravate existing disputes over land or create new contestations (Colin and Woodhouse Reference Colin and Woodhouse2010). Amid inter-ethnic rivalry over access and control of land, land titling can fuel contestations over the legitimacy and legality of tenure arrangements, notably about who is in charge and which norms and practice apply to establish land access and control over land (Broegaard Reference Broegaard2009; Peters Reference Peters2013). In Gambella’s Majang zone, while the Ethiopian government’s rationale for land titling has been to reduce conflict by regulating land sales, as well as to ensure tenure security and strengthen the efficient use of land for investment, the formalization of land deals has often had adverse effects and has generated contestations over the meaning of past land transactions rather than resolve them. This specific case study, within its larger regional context, shows how local struggles over land tenure within broader dynamics of the commodification of land-related relations, and political economies of dispossession embedded in national-level politics, exacerbated violence and reinforced ethnic distinctions.

Dynamics in land tenure regimes and ethnic relations in the Majang forest land

Normative and institutional pluralism and multiple claims to land are a key part of this study’s historical context. Comparing customary tenure with statist land tenure across time and space helps deepen our understanding of the intersection of contemporary land issues and ethnic identity. Therefore, this section examines what constituted Majang land tenure in the past. How was it different from what it is today? The Majang zone is one of the most forested landscapes of Ethiopia’s Gambella region. According to the Central Statistics Agency (CSA 2007), about 90 per cent of Majang people dwell deep in the thick forest and make use of forest resources for their livelihoods. Majang livelihoods are intimately connected to dense tropical rainforest. Furthermore, habitation in the thick tropical rainforest and forest-based livelihoods are understood as the hallmarks of Majang identity. Nevertheless, state-mechanized coffee farming and timber production, as well as the influx and settlement of highlanders from various parts of the country, have resulted in the massive clearing of forest lands. For many Majang, the loss of forest land ecology is not only a loss of forest-based livelihoods but also a challenge to a shared sense of identity centred on the forested landscape.

In the past, Majang people were shifting cultivators living on uncontested forest lands; they cultivated fields for three or four years before moving on and clearing another new plot to allow the former fields to regenerate (Stauder Reference Stauder1971). Stauder (ibid.: 165) argues that the concept of exclusive property rights over land resources was unknown to them or ‘irrelevant’ to their context until the late 1960s. Stauder (Reference Stauder1972: 153) also represents Majang political culture as ‘anarchic and amorphous’. However, it is inaccurate to argue that Majang people lacked rudimentary knowledge of land and resource ownership rights. Rather, Majang practices overlapped loosely defined land tenure rights with inseparable attachments to territory. Furthermore, contrary to Stauder’s rather Eurocentric position, Majang people did and do have socio-political structures for the management of land through ‘councils of elders’ who rule over territory and land-related conflicts. Forest is a communal estate owned by a lineage, clan or kinsmen.Footnote ² A ‘traditional’ Majang forest holding system means that individuals own private forest land known as jang.Footnote ³ Jang owners have the right to pass down forest ownership rights to their kin. The boundaries of private jang within an ancestral domain are marked by tall trees on which hives are placed, as well as by mountains, hills, valleys and rivers.Footnote ⁴ As one informant in Semay explained:

Majang communities have elaborated arrangements of rights not only to forest land but also for hives placed in trees. Hives, consisting of hollowed logs placed in the trees, are often boundary markers for private jang ownership.Footnote ⁶

Jang (private or family estates) within shared communal tenure are inherited by sons and cannot be bought or sold. The councils of elders who rule over forest lands have the right to define and allocate land to the lineages and also settle disputes arising from land-related conflicts. However, land conflicts and confrontations between Majang and ‘highlanders’ have been dealt with through national land administration institutions and courts. Yet many Majang view all land in the ‘traditional’ Majang homelands as belonging to Majang. Most believe that authority for land administration and adjudication must reside in the council of máruàk (elders in the local vernacular). However, these councils do not have state-recognized authority over land administration and adjudication. The courts, land administrators and land governance institutions do not recognize customary land rights, even though these account for most land transactions in the area. In practice, land tenure is embedded in the socio-political structure of elders’ councils, even if they lack legal recognition at national level, and these tensions are what animate different interpretations of land transactions.

The establishment in 1986 of Tepi coffee plantation, the earliest state-run coffee plantation in the area, and the consequent encroachment of highlanders settling on Majang forest land have created new pressures on customary land tenure. Increasing land values pushed Majang people to engage in informal land sales, despite the inalienability of customary land tenure. These land sales and/or leases were often conducted without the consent of wider lineages, clans or even family. Selling jang to outsiders not only has been a source of conflict among family and community but also has revealed tensions between statist and customary tenure regimes.

Perhaps, in the past, before the encroachment of outsiders and central state authorities into Majang territory, the mediating role of the councils of elders and the abundance of land with low population densities meant that powerful competition between and among lineages, clans or kin groups was less likely. The imperial regime incorporated the south-western peripheries, including Majang territory, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Donham and James Reference Donham and James1986). The south-western lowlands were forcefully integrated into the territorial and administrative dominion of the modern Ethiopian state with unequal demographic and geographic relations to the central highland core – that is, the Amhara/Tigray-dominated Ethiopian state (Donham and James Reference Donham and James1986; Markakis Reference Markakis2011; Meckelburg Reference Meckelburg and Gebrehiwot Berhe2014; Wedekind Reference Wedekind2024). Indeed, the integration of Majang people and territory into the Ethiopian empire was coercive (Stauder Reference Stauder1971: 152; Seyoum Reference Seyoum2015a). Majang people were not only politically and economically marginalized but also victims of slavery (Seyoum Reference Seyoum2015a), which left them with a legacy of continued stigmatized identity. Majang people understood the benefits of avoiding open confrontation with the hegemony of the centralized Ethiopian state (Sato Reference Sato, James, Donham, Kurimoto and Triurzlil2002: 193; Stauder Reference Stauder1972), but this passive resistance changed as their socio-economic and ecological niche was transformed after the intrusion of Christian missionaries, ‘highlanders’ and state bureaucracies into their territory (Vaughan Reference Vaughan2003; Sato Reference Sato, James, Donham, Kurimoto and Triurzlil2002).

Majang people have suffered land alienation and domination under imperial conquest since the late nineteenth century (Vaughan Reference Vaughan2003; Sato Reference Sato, James, Donham, Kurimoto and Triurzlil2002). The challenges facing Majang today are not only the effects of unequal state-making processes in the periphery but also partly the result of state-run coffee plantations that started operations in the area as part of the modernizing programmes of the Derg regime (Oakland Institute 2011). Tepi coffee plantation was established during the Derg regime on 933 hectares of land. The regime used the ‘eminent domain principle’ – that is, an excessive application of state power for expropriating land or property with no compensation. Through this principle, the Derg displaced between 4,000 and 5,000 Majang people from their lands without compensation (Seyoum Reference Seyoum2015b: 60). The Teppi Green Coffee Estate Share Company, a joint venture with the Ethiopian state, violently enlarged the plantation by about 2 kilometres in 2012. The plantation has attracted thousands of labourers from the highlands to work there since the 1980s.

Incoming highland labourers and their families initially settled on the edges of plantations but later acquired more land from Majang people through sale and lease arrangements. Incoming labourers from the highlands were increasingly attracted by the prospect of clearing land in the Majang forests and growing coffee. As highlanders impinged on Majang land, Majang people migrated deeper into the forests to escape conflicts, clearing more and more marginal forest land. Former highland labourers and their families followed them, acquiring that land, as Majang moved further into inaccessible niches. The settlements that they once inhabited, most of which still have Majang names, are now largely devoid of Majang families (Oakland Institute 2011).

The Derg regime also forcefully relocated farmers from the famine-stricken northern highland provinces of Wello and Tigray into Majang territory in the mid-1980s. These settlers were allotted both private plots and large estates for socialist collective farms, further alienating Majang families from forest lands.Footnote ⁷ When the Derg regime was toppled in 1991, highland settlers encroached on the forest lands to enlarge their individual farmlands. When their children reached the age to start farming their own land, newcomers were still arriving into the area. Typically, a young landless person would arrive to work during the coffee harvest before engaging in a sharecropping agreement with a local Majang person, or, more straightforwardly, buying a piece of land.

Highlanders’ encroachment on Majang forest lands reflects a range of different forms of land transaction through which incoming individuals and groups from the highlands secured access to land. Despite legal provisions that prohibited land ‘sales’ under the socialist EPRDF regime – provisions that have been maintained by Ethiopia’s current government – such ‘sales’ were often disguised and legalized by the peasant association (PA), the lowest administrative organ of the state. A common practice was for contracts between sellers (the ‘customary’ owners) and buyers (tenants) to be written under the legal rubric of ‘gifts’ instead of outright ‘land sales’; these would then be considered lawful once stamped by PA officials. Such contracts between sellers and buyers were written in Amharic. Compared to highlanders, and even in comparison to other ‘indigenous’ people in Gambella, Majang people lag behind in educational standards (Seyoum Reference Seyoum2015a). Except for political offices and managerial positions, civil service posts are all filled by highlanders. Most highlanders used their better command of the Amharic language and their greater familiarity with dealing with PA and land administration officials (almost all of them also highlanders) to their benefit and at the expense of Majang people. As a result, Majang were often not aware that these contracts were disguised land sales or leases. Majang understandings of the contracts were rudimentary and many merely signed ‘without knowing what it says. They have in mind that within [a] few years, they would get it back’ (Seyoum Reference Seyoum2015a: 210). The formalization of these transactions often involved bribing PA officials. In most cases, the amount of such payoffs, including the costs of the broker, ranged between 15 and 25 per cent of the contract.Footnote ⁸

Sharecropping arrangements have been the most prevalent type of land transaction in the Majang zone. In these arrangements, the harvest is shared equally between the landed tenant and the sharecropper. Different forms of sharing exist in Ethiopia. In this zone, in 2018, highlanders paid about 3,000–5,000 Ethiopian birr (approximately US$25–40) per hectare. In exchange, a Majang person would offer a plot of land. The sharecropping rent is paid in kind as compensation for the three-year delay before coffee plants bear fruit. Most sharecropping contracts give way to a written agreement that runs for five or eight years and is legalized only after the contractual agreement is stamped by the PA. After conclusion of the agreement, the highlander plants coffee. When coffee trees offer their first fruits, possibly after three years, the harvest is divided equally between both parties. A rather vague and mischievous kind of sharecropping, anomalous to the rest of the country, has emerged recently in the Majang zone. Under this peculiar accord, following the initial harvest (after between three and five years), both parties proceed to an equal division of the coffee parcel – that is, the land now planted with coffee trees – instead of sharing the coffee harvest. It appears that this practice owes much to the familiarity of highlanders with the bureaucratic functions of state land authorities, at the expense of marginalized ethnic minorities.

For many Majang, the possible loss of their land rights was not clear when they were negotiating such sharecropping arrangements. As one elder who lost most of his land in this manner complained:

This illustrates how sharecropping arrangements between highlanders and Majang landholders often take place on unequal terms. The elder landholder regretted engaging in the fraudulent agreement and required government intervention to return the lands he had lost. To be more specific, the Majang elder appealed to state action to reacquire his prior landholdings from Gaaleer, whom he argued acquired his customary landholdings through a ‘mischievous’ accord.

Dividing equal parcels of land for sharecropping allowed an equal reparation of the land between Majang people and ‘highlanders’. In most cases, after a parcel had been shared, the classic equal agreement still operated on the owner’s half of the parcel. At odds with regional land laws, this practice in the Majang zone helps tenants at the expense of owners. The tenants obtain their own land on which they can enjoy the whole harvest, and keep on cultivating the other half of the parcel, with the advantage of half of that harvest too.

The research for this article uncovered several examples of such fraudulent and unequal sharecropping or lease arrangements between highlanders and Majang owners. This suggests that they are widespread and quasi-legitimized practices across the Majang zone. Economic power and networking with regional and federal state structures limited the capacity of Majang households to confront such abuses by the incoming tenants. In the longer term, such unequal land sale/lease and sharecropping arrangements have brought about legal complications over ‘customary’ land tenure. As a consequence, past Majang land sales to highlanders have also been subjected to contestation.

Since 2008, Majang have faced further pressures from both EPRDF villagization projects and large-scale commercial agricultural investments. In 2009, the EPRDF regime initiated a villagization resettlement scheme that aimed to resettle up to 45,000 households on about 180,000 hectares. Indigenous Anuak and Opo populations who were settled along river banks and practised flood retreat agriculture and Majang populations practising ‘cut and burn’ shifting cultivation have been target populations for this social re-engineering programme (Gebresenbet Reference Gebresenbet2016; Rahmato Reference Rahmato2011; Ojulu Reference Ojulu2013). Meanwhile large-scale land acquisitions for plantations have also continued, and local communities have continued to express concern about land leases in their primary forest areas. For example, contrary to local economic and environmental concerns, the regional and federal state authorities concluded a lease agreement related to primary forest area, in Gumare and Kabu PAs, for a tea plantation in 2010.

The effects of land registration in the early 2010s on land tenure and ethnicity

Land conflicts between Majang and highlanders increased, particularly in Godere district, after the contested 2005 elections, when CUD won the highest share of the vote. Regional and federal governments justified the introduction of neoliberal land titling in Gambella region as a means of regulating uncontrolled land sales, which they regarded as the underlying cause of the conflicts. The formalization of land rights through registration and certification was a key regional land use reform scheme in Gambella after 2010. However, its implementation was postponed until mid-2014 because of the lack of an adequate budget.Footnote ¹⁰ The objective of land certification was to ensure tenure security, strengthen efficient use of land for investment and settle land conflicts. Regional and federal authorities argued that cadastral surveying and the delivery of land certificates would regulate the uncontrolled ‘land sales’ and encroachments into the vital forest lands of the zone. Godere district was selected as one of the first sites to experiment with registration partly because of the technical ease of demarcating coffee-producing zones in cadastral compared to pastoral areas in the lowlands of Gambella, where marked parcel boundaries are rare. In late 2014, the funds from the Sustainable Land Management Project II, funded by the World Bank, were released to the region to run land certification. Land administration experts embarked on raising land registration issues with the authorities in Godere district. Many Majang elites viewed the land registration project as an opportunity to rectify the historical mistakes of land dispossessions and displacements of Majang people in the Majang zone.Footnote ¹¹ Majang zonal and woreda-level political leaders sought to rectify the long-term dynamics of Majang land dispossession by documenting land titles for Majang peasants under the legal provision outlined in regional land law and ethnic federal arrangements.Footnote ¹² Between September 2014 and June 2015, following disclosure of the pending implementation of the regional land certification plan, violent conflict broke out between Majang and highlanders in Godere and other places over contested meanings of land transactions in the forest lands. According to people interviewed in Meti, there have been sporadic interpersonal and small-scale conflicts between Majang and highlanders over land deals over the last several decades, and particularly after the contested 2005 election.Footnote ¹³ These sporadic conflicts turned into a larger, violent conflict on 11 September 2014.Footnote ¹⁴ Many people were shot or killed with machetes, while thousands fled to neighbouring forests and to the southern region. One Majang elite estimated that about 500 people were killed, and many houses were burned down during this incident.Footnote ¹⁵ Low-grade and sporadic conflict continued until June 2015.Footnote ¹⁶ Contested land sales/leases, disputes over the meaning of past land transactions, increasing large-scale land grabs across the zone and the non-titling of communal forest land tenure for Majang owners had created the structural conditions that allowed the spontaneous spark of an interpersonal dispute between Majang and highland migrants, perhaps assisted by the aggravation of local political elites, to escalate into much larger, more widespread and more violent ethnic clashes.Footnote ¹⁷

Some highlanders complained that Majang elites were preparing to expel incoming settlers to make the land ‘free’ for the EPRDF’s large-scale agricultural investment projects, and to ‘take back’ the land that had been bought before land registration began. As a focus group interview with Amhara settlers revealed:

Not all Majang were necessarily in agreement. There was variation among Majang people about opposition to highlanders. While landless youth and women were often staunch supporters of Majang elites,Footnote ¹⁹ some elders were reluctant to involve themselves in opposition as they were unaware of the context.Footnote ²⁰ As already discussed, sharecropping arrangements have been the most prevalent type of land deal in the Majang zone. Often, the way in which these arrangements have been practised favoured highland tenants at the expense (and sometimes dispossession) of Majang landowners. The land registration process did not offer much relief to dispossessed Majang. Land registration involved more than merely obtaining documents for a specified parcel of land; it transformed the repartition of land tenure, thereby, in practice, often favouring highland settlers. Cadastral surveyors were often accused of taking bribes to engage in the repartition of prior tenure in unequal terms in favour of highlanders.Footnote ²¹ Majang women were often the most affected by such sharecropping arrangements, as a group of Majang women revealed:

This example shows that land surveyors and land tax payments could be used to obtain land titles belonging to Majang women. It is one example of how land registration in the Majang zone could benefit highlanders with greater access to, and familiarity with, state bureaucratic structures, officials and procedures. More broadly, it shows how land registration had the effect of driving different actors into making new claims over land, or reinterpreting past land transactions, or changing sharecropping arrangements.

It also shows how land registration could drive contestations with existing authorities administrating the cadastre. Although land lease/share arrangements involved official registrations, these were often not recognized by Majang kinsmen. This has caused intra-Majang tensions and disputes. Even those who leased or sold the land in the first place often maintained claims on what they considered their ‘ancestral land’. One young landless Majang condemned the land sale/lease arrangements for causing problems within Majang families:

This shows how families were divided by the dispossession of Majang land through sharecropping arrangements and the troubled land registration process that followed. It also illustrates how tensions between Majang men, women and youth were exacerbated through these land dispossessions, as land was often sold without consultation with mothers and kin. Furthermore, it also shows how such dispossessions provoked youth discontent, their anger against highlanders’ stereotypes of Majang, and the subsequent attempts of Majang youth to reaffirm ‘ancestral’ claims to land.

The legalization of past land transactions has favoured both the highlanders and EPRDF large-scale agricultural investments. Land administration officials (mainly cadastral surveyors) developed a column in their documentation describing how each parcel of land was acquired. Although in the Majang zone most highlanders ‘bought’ their land, ‘land sales’ remain formally outlawed and so land officials prohibited such ‘sales’ from being recorded as such in the cadastre. Although many of the highlanders admit that they ‘bought’ the land, usually these lands are marked as ‘cleared’ rather than purchased. As a group of cadastral surveyors explained:

This illustrates how structural bias towards highlanders among land officials reached regional levels. As a result, Majang landowners were registered in only a minority of remote PAs in the Mengesh district, where Majang people are still a local majority.Footnote ²⁵ This was also where most of the violence associated with land registration occurred between 2014 and 2015.Footnote ²⁶ Although a few Majang people are small-scale coffee producers, most in this district were then engaged in shifting cultivation, hunting, gathering and apiculture (beekeeping). However, cadastral surveyors decided not to register forest parcels where coffee was not flourishing.Footnote ²⁷ This non-registration of title for forest land not planted with coffee was likely to trigger new claims over land rights. In Mengesh, Majang people were the most affected by this ‘parcel dropout’, as the majority of these plots are used by them for ‘traditional’ modes of subsistence, including root crops and apiculture.Footnote ²⁸

Majang elites viewed the land registration campaign as an opportunity to rectify the historical displacement of Majang people from land by redistributing landholdings concentrated in the hands of highland settlers.Footnote ²⁹ However, contrary to these expectations, and the legal provisions that prohibit land sales, lands that had been purchased or illegally occupied by non-Majang were registered as ‘lands cleared’. ‘Lands cleared’ in this administrative sense implies forest land where coffee is not grown, or empty land without prior ownership, which highlanders have appropriated for cultivation.Footnote ³⁰ This categorization disregards indigenous land use categories and rights associated with beekeeping and hunting and gathering, and leave such claims unregistered.Footnote ³¹

Given the close ties that have long existed between Majang livelihoods, cultural practices and forest landscapes, the cadastral surveyors’ administrative decision to register purchased land as ‘uncleared’, under pressure from the regional and federal authorities, has not only continued the dispossession of Majang lands and undermined their forest livelihoods, but it has also put the distinct cultural practices of Majang people under threat. The law states that illegally occupied plots should be distributed to landless farmers or returned to the commons or land banks, but government land surveyors, often suspected of being motivated by ethnic solidarity with the highlanders, and pressured by the regional and federal authorities, certified not only encroachments on forest and communal lands but also de facto transfers of land.Footnote ³² In certifying such encroachments, they rejected the opposition of Majang elites.Footnote ³³ The regularization of informal land sales and leases and the denial of land registration and titling for communal land use categories have had enduring adverse effects on Majang forms of social authority and customary tenure.

If Majang councils of elders have long mediated customary land disputes among Majang lineages, clans and families over boundaries and inheritance, their authority to regulate forest land use and occupation more broadly has been deeply undermined by economic, demographic and environmental pressures in the Majang zone over the last forty years. Conflicts among Majang people about boundary disputes or inheritance are still handled by these councils, but they have negligible institutional capacity to regulate land use or occupation once Majang individuals have sold land without consulting kin, beyond refusing to consent to the transfer of ancestral authority to outsiders. Rather, land tenure conflicts between Majang people and outsiders take place through a vertically integrated system of state courts. This institutional arrangement is supposed to provide access to national institutions to voice grievances and to request redress. However, lack of knowledge about the court system and legal costs have limited the capacity of Majang people, and of other marginalized ethnic minorities, to voice grievances and make successful claims against state authorities or the highlanders who have dispossessed them, who often wield greater economic power and influence at regional and federal levels.

In addition, in Gambella, authorities administrating the cadastre have often prioritized modern agricultural practices over the subsistence-based livelihoods of indigenous people. Communal landholding is frequently represented as an impediment to agricultural modernization. Majang forms of customary tenure and land rights are therefore denigrated and marginalized in favour of the formalization of land rights. This has fuelled the non-titling of communal forest land tenure, which has further enabled land appropriation by others, or has even led to new land sales. In this sense, again, land registration processes have legitimized local land administrators’ authority to control the land and resources of indigenous people, based on deeply institutionalized discrimination against Majang understandings of land tenure. This, in turn, has exacerbated feelings of exclusion from, and mistrust of, state authorities among Majang people, who often equate state officials with highlander groups.

The Majang resistance to displacement

Majang people have responded to displacement and dispossession in different ways. Some fled traditional settlements and went deeper into the forest. Others responded to new economic incentives by selling or leasing forest land, and a few entered coffee farming. All these reactions have adversely affected the forest land and their settlements. Those fleeing from highlander encroachment cleared new forest lands. Those who sold or leased their forest land to incomers put demographic pressure on other settlements. As observed by Scott (Reference Scott2009: xii), among the ‘hill people’ of Southeast Asia, the grabbing of land and other resources by outsiders through tactics of transplanting ‘loyal and land-hungry valley populations to the hills’ has reduced the local modes of resistance that for centuries helped them to retain autonomy and territorial control.

In the past, Majang left their traditional settlements and went deeper into the forest to escape tensions over land from intra- and inter-group conflicts (Stauder Reference Stauder1971; Sato Reference Sato, James, Donham, Kurimoto and Triurzlil2002). Majang resistance to displacement has not been confined to avoiding confrontations by evacuating their settlements or integrating into commercial coffee farms. The rising economic dominance of highlanders and the growing perception of economic exclusion among indigenous communities in Gambella have ‘created an explosive mix between class and identity, fuelling tension between “natives” and “settlers”’ (Feyissa Reference Feyissa2013: 183). In April 2010, Majang people used both legal and political campaigns associated with environmental concerns (Ojulu Reference Ojulu2013), and later violent struggle, to oppose the lease of 3,012 hectares of forest land for tea plantations to Verdanta, an Indian-owned company (ibid.). Local communities appealed through the councils of elders to the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) and even to the head of state, on the grounds that tea plantations infringed the ecological sustainability of primary forest associated with their identity and their survival. This legal and political appeal received support from the then president, Girma Wolde-Giorgis, and from the EPA, which pushed for due reconsideration of the lease agreement. However, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and the Gambella regional state authorities refused reconsideration of the lease and ordered the transfer of the land to the company (ibid.). In response, protesting villagers from Gumare and Kabu set fire to properties owned by Verdanta. The protesters took control of the plantation complex and burned explosive stores, fuel tankers, tractors, excavators and timber that had been harvested from the forest lands by the company (Seyoum Reference Seyoum2015b). This case showed how Majang people have used both non-violent and violent struggles to prevent their customary land rights from being overridden by large-scale commercial state farms.