In any analysis of African land tenure systems, the link between ownership and territory is compounded by ethnicity. In Côte d'Ivoire, interpretations of two public policies with intertwined (and, in effect, collusive) agendas – relating on the one hand to land tenure, and on the other hand to nationality – have evolved against a backdrop of increasingly heated debates on nationalism and citizenship. This process has been an instrument of change in social and land relationships, marred on occasion by violence. This is particularly true in rural zones in the west. In Côte d'Ivoire in recent years, as in Ghana and Burkina Faso, indigenous status has constituted a means of establishing control over land (Dembélé Reference Dembélé, Marc and Pape2002; Lentz Reference Lentz, Kuba, Lentz and Somda2003; Babo Reference Babo2009). Gruénais (Reference Gruénais1985: 20) suggests that ‘the anteriority of the presence of a group becomes truly significant when a particular function is attached to the group with indigenous status which differentiates it from the group which arrived later or from elsewhere’. The study of land ownership in Africa therefore revolves around indigenous status, which establishes a relationship between ethnicity and territoriality.
For the Kroumen in Tabou in the south-west of Côte d'Ivoire, as for many other African groups, anteriority in a territory remains a decisive factor in establishing the control of a group over land. The Kroumen used to ‘give’ land to foreigners, following libations and incantations to their ancestors and ‘gods of the land’, asking for their blessing, for protection for the activities which would take place there, and for fruitful harvests. This established their authority over both land and migrants, based on the bond of kinship and the mystico-religious connection forged (Babo and Droz Reference Babo and Droz2008).
For many years, the issue of land control was unproblematic in Ivoirian society, owing primarily to the abundance of available land and also, and above all, to the ability of the former Houphouët-Boigny regime to redistribute the fruits of growth (Konaté Reference Konaté2003). Furthermore, Ivoirians and foreign nationals had had access to land and developed it on the basis of the pre-eminence of customary land law. This favoured direct ‘agreements’ and arrangements between populations with diverse origins. Although in the majority of cases these ‘agreements’ were made without recourse to the law, they legitimately regulated intra- and inter-communal land relationships by referring to customary institutions (Sikor and Lund Reference Sikor and Lund2009).
However, since the crisis in the late 1980s, land saturation, particularly in the forest regions in the west, has led to a resurgence of indigenous land claims. In fact, greater democratic openness in the early 1990s caused the issue of the complex yet fluid land tenure systems in the western forest zones to resurface. Previous land tenure agreements were challenged, bringing to the surface underlying tensions that were translated rapidly into open conflict between indigenous groups (Guéré, Bété, Bakoué, Dida and Kroumen), national migrants (mostly Akan-Baoulé) and non-national migrants (Burkinabé, Malians and Guineans).
Faced with numerous conflicts and in the absence of clear legislation favouring the increasingly problematic application of customary law, the state took the decision to clarify regulations relating to land. A short-lived Rural Land Plan was implemented and a Land Act was subsequently passed unanimously in 1998 by all parties represented in the National Assembly (Rassemblement des républicains, RDR; Parti démocratique de Côte d'Ivoire-Rassemblement démocratique africain, PDCI-RDA; Front populaire ivoirien, FPI). However, this act promptly became a source of discord between communities in rural areas and also between the main political stakeholders, despite the fact that they had backed it unanimously.
It is useful at this point to review the socio-political background of the early 1990s, which was characterized by a political crisis with identity-based undercurrents, followed by a war that came to an end in April 2011. Greater democratic openness in 1990 created a power struggle which set political groupings, and subsequently also ethnic groupings, against each other in Côte d'Ivoire. These rifts were transferred to the land tenure arena during the multi-party elections in which land became a rallying call and propaganda tool for all leaders, especially those in the opposition FPI party. Land therefore became the focal electoral issue, both at a national party political level (PDCI-RDA and FPI) and at a local level between indigenous communities in the west (Bété, Dida, Guéré, who supported the FPI) and non-indigenous groups (Baoulé, who supported the PDCI-RDA). The issue later assumed a nationalist dimension in 1994 when the RDR leader, Alassane Ouattara, was accused of being a ‘foreigner’ or, more specifically, a Burkinabé. The policy of ivoirité, or Ivoirian national identity, which evolved with the objective of resolving political conflicts in favour of Ivoirian nationals, spread rapidly to all areas, notably rural land tenure.
It was against this backdrop of the stigmatization of foreign nationals that conflict broke out between indigenous Kroumen and non-native Dagari-Burkinabé in 1999. This conflict led to the expulsion of over 20,000 Burkinabé planters from the Tabou region. The Burkinabé planters who were expelled in 1999 were due to return to their plantations in 2006, having carried out the required reparation rituals in keeping with Kroumen custom. However, at the outbreak of war in 2002, the Ivoirian authorities openly accused Burkina Faso of acting as a support base and providing military assistance to rebels from the north. This led to a hardening of indigenous positions, notably among young people, who henceforth campaigned for the permanent expulsion of Burkinabé planters from their regions.
This extremist position was fuelled, as will be demonstrated, both by a reinvention of their traditions and an interpretation of a land act that asserted the pre-eminence of customary law and exclusive ownership of land by Ivoirians. Although it was obvious, against a backdrop of nationalism manifested in the concept of ivoirité, that a refusal on the part of the RDR to vote in favour of this act in 1998 would have lent credence to critics who called it the ‘foreigners’ party’, interpretations of this act in forest areas in the west of the country and the renewed conflict that ensued motivated the party to voice criticism of the act. Many observers believed, like this party, that Law 98-750 of 23 December 1998 went beyond merely regulating land rights. It is fair to say that by establishing a connection between land law and the controversial issue of nationality, the act demonstrated a nationalist agenda and would play a decisive role in determining the influence of foreign nationals on the agricultural economy. The act was deemed discriminatory and has never been enforced since 1998. Later, some experts (Bouquet Reference Bouquet2005; Dembélé Reference Dembélé, Marc and Pape2002; Chauveau 2002, inter alia) and participants at the Linas-Marcoussis roundtable talks in January 2003 identified it as one of the original causes of the war which erupted in Côte d'Ivoire in September 2002.Footnote 1
This raises the issue of why an act designed to regulate social and economic relationships with land on an unequivocal and permanent basis became a source of conflict. What are the connections with public policy relating to foreign nationals (embodied in the Nationality Act of 1972 and the Immigration Act of 1990) which played a part in making the act a social and political issue? What influence did it have on relationships between communities at a local level, in particular in the Tabou region, where the way in which the legislation was interpreted seems to have served to re-establish control of land by customary institutions? These questions are addressed in this article.
Much has been written by researchers about developments introducing conflict into exchanges enshrined within the framework of tutorat (guardianship) in strong social relationships (Chauveau Reference Chauveau2000, Reference Chauveau, Kuba and Lentz2006, Reference Chauveau and Eberhard2008; Chauveau and Colin Reference Chauveau and Colin2010), about ambiguous commercial ‘contracts’ and about attempts to reassert the rights associated with them (Colin and Ayouz Reference Colin and Ayouz2006; Koné Reference Koné2002; Kouamé Reference Kouamé2010). Studies have highlighted ethnicity as a new feature in regulating land tenure relationships in the context of a socio-political crisis (Colin et al. Reference Colin, Kouamé and Soro2007; Cutolo Reference Cutolo2010). The political manipulation of land rights has also been analysed against this backdrop (Boone Reference Boone2009; Boone and Kriger Reference Boone and Kriger2010). However, at present few writers analysing these land tenure relationships have addressed the combined effects of two public (macrosocial) policies, on local (mesosocial) communities competing for land resources.
The Ivoirian Land Act of 1998, which was developed against the backdrop of the political and identity crisis of ivoirité, tied the right to ownership of land to the identity of the land user. The aim of this article is to show that this act subtly appropriated the debate on the Nationality Act and that collusion between these two public policies created an instrument to regulate land tenure relationships at a community level. Under this act, it was henceforth necessary to prove Ivoirian nationality in order to assert the right to land ownership.
In Côte d'Ivoire, the phases involved in building a nation state under a single-party regime and the more widespread crisis and democratization process in the 1990s are crucial to an understanding of public policy, including policies relating to property, land allocation and immigration. From 1960 to 2010, public policies relating to immigration and land tenure under various governments became the focus of political challenges that were not always conducive to efficient policy drafting and still less to effective implementation. The limitations of the Houphouétist model for immigration and access to agricultural land, which was formulated in the early 1960s, were apparent by the 1980s if not before (Contamin and Memel-Fotê Reference Contamin and Memel-Fotê1997). There is clear evidence over time of the inability of the state to implement a politically legitimate system of public management of natural resources (Hussenot Reference Hussenot1983), defined as the ability to devise and/or codify democratic models for managing and addressing disputes and accessing resources. On the specific issue of immigration, Akindès (Reference Akindès2003) has argued that there is an absence throughout West Africa of coherent and clear immigration policies (defined as a body of mechanisms and systems implemented by the state to encourage non-nationals to play a part in the collective life of the nation and to respond to their social and political needs); Côte d'Ivoire is no exception in this respect. In the absence of coherent rules to facilitate access to work, education, housing, marriage, language, and so on as means of integration, foreign migrants in Côte d'Ivoire are vulnerable, especially in times of political and economic crisis. This is a widespread phenomenon that is not specific to the Ivoirian situation. In France, for example, successive waves of European immigration from Italy, Belgium, Poland or Portugal, and immigration from the Maghreb and Africa have given rise to xenophobia and violence in periods of economic crisis in 1889, 1930 and 1980 (Mucchielli Reference Mucchielli1998). More recently, in South Africa in 2010, Zimbabwean immigrants were the victims of violence and were expelled by a South African population affected by endemic unemployment. So too in Côte d'Ivoire, where the urban unemployment crisis on the one hand, and land saturation, the scarcity of arable land and developments in land policy on the other hand, have made the issue of the number of foreign nationals and their access to land a key focus for debate in recent years.
LAND LAW DEVELOPMENTS IN CÔTE D'IVOIRE: FROM ‘THE LAND BELONGS TO THE PERSON WHO WORKS IT’ TO THE ACT OF 1998
The principle of appropriating land through work
The success of large-scale farming in the early 1960s led to rapid absorption of forest in the regions of the east and south-east. The Ivoirian cocoa frontier gradually moved towards the west and the south-west, which were characterized by a vast reservoir of forest and low population density (see the map of Côte d'Ivoire in Chauveau and Colin Reference Chauveau and Colin2010: 87). Furthermore, local people were traditionally hunter-gatherers living by subsistence proto-agriculture (Holas Reference Holas1968) and were not drawn to commercial cocoa cultivation.
On the coast, or more specifically in Kroumen territory, the construction of the first colonial ports and trading posts had meant that the majority of people were attracted to seafaring activities, abandoning farming. The name Kroumen, a corruption of ‘crewmen’, is derived from their seafaring prowess. The Baoulé, by contrast, had long worked for their Agni neighbours and had been integrated into the cocoa production economy, yet faced a shortage of land suitable for cultivating this crop in their home areas.
In the early 1970s, President Houphouët-Boigny developed a plan to move BaouléFootnote 2 migrants into the forest regions of the west, and eventually the south-west, on a permanent basis, and to facilitate immigrant workers' control over the land they farmed. In order to achieve this, he declared that ‘land belongs to the person who works it’. The President was to all intents and purposes perpetuating the policy of the French colonial administration, which was based on discriminatory cultural criteria favouring immigrants who were deemed to be biddable and hard-working (Bonnecase Reference Bonnecase2001). However, this Houphouétist approach to land ownership compounded the legal fog surrounding land rights, as it had no basis either in the customary land tenure principles of the various traditional societies or in modern administrative law. In effect, the Houphouétist policy brought about a profound transformation in land rights based in theory on state ownership of land,Footnote 3 but in practice (in terms of actual management at a local level) resting on customary institutions including land chiefs, village headsmen, landowners, lineage chiefs, tribal chiefs, kings, et cetera. This de facto policy appeared in effect to rescind customary rights based on indigenous status.
On the basis of this declaration, the right to land ownership was henceforth acquired by work, to the exclusion of the pre-eminence of ancestral links with village lands or membership of an ethno-linguistic founding group. The regional effects of this were very uneven, however. Although the Baoulé from the central region were able to develop Kroumen land in the Tabou region in the south-west, the reverse scenario did not hold true (Babo Reference Babo2010a). In practice, this principle of appropriation of land rights over land being worked was designed to apply to the forest zones of the west and south-west, where coffee and cocoa cultivation had raised Côte d'Ivoire to the rank of a major global producer. Although this principle, which was still ambiguous with respect to institutional control of land worked in this way, was never actually codified, it assumed legal force for many years (Otch-Akpa Reference Otch-Akpa1993). It allowed Baoulé and foreign nationals from West Africa, in particular Burkinabé, to colonize vast tracts in a land rush. As well as receiving support from the powerful PDCI-RDA state party, the conquest of land in the west by non-indigenous Baoulé and by non-native West Africans was facilitated by the tradition of tutorat (guardianship) and also by a traditional land management system of division of plots of land between families in the west (Babo and Droz Reference Babo and Droz2008; Babo Reference Babo2009). This fragmentation of land favoured the commodification of tutorat and of the land itself.
The economic crisis and the upsurge of indigenous claims
In the late 1970s, Côte d'Ivoire entered a protracted period of economic crisis, which also manifested itself in a crisis in the agricultural sector. The closure of the agricultural pioneer frontier in the forest regions of the west was characterized by an imbalance between the dwindling supply of available farmland and increased demand for land. This placed pressure on pre-existing land tenure agreements based on differing interpretations of exchange. For the indigenous Bété, Kroumen, Bakoué, Dida and Guéré from the west, ‘the land was never sold’, but according to the non-indigenous Baoulé, Agni and Sénoufo, and to Burkinabé and Malian immigrants, ‘the land was bought’. This difference in interpretation regarding land tenure relationships was fuelled by the progressive commodification of tutorat. Over time, previously symbolic exchanges in the form of gifts (such as animals, drinks, assistance with fieldwork, produce picked in the wild, or a proportion of a harvest) and/or social services assumed the form of commercial deals with permanent requests for financial payments.
Furthermore, in the regions of the extreme south-west (Tabou, Grabo and Grand-Béréby), management of local landholdings by the state gave rise to frustration. These frustrations clearly demonstrate that certain aspects of institutional control (or the absence thereof) were not clearly defined when land was transferred to the state. Claims state that indigenous communities only ceded rights of use and thus expected to retain institutional control over the land. For example, during the economic crisis and subsequent privatization programme, in 1996–7 the state-owned company Palmindustrie, which owned a large amount of state land there, reassigned its assets to private companies including PALMCI, a Côte d'Ivoire-based company involved in the management of industrial oil plantations (Chérif Reference Chérif2009).Footnote 4 Moreover, a portion of state plantations was also transferred to individual former employees as part of their legal entitlement. In the eyes of the indigenous population, these processes created a situation in which ‘foreigners’ (as they defined the new landholders) occupied ‘their’ land. To make matters worse, they believed that these new ‘foreign’ owners showed them no consideration. According to the Besseréké land chief, ‘these big bosses who are not from our region are occupying our land, and what's more they show us no respect. They splash us on the roads with their four-wheel drives and don't even acknowledge us.’Footnote 5 For some customary chiefs, this new situation was unacceptable and hard to tolerate. As far as they were concerned, they had transferred ‘their land’ to the state and not to private concerns. The state should have made an agreement with them, if the intention was to sell the land on to private concerns. In fact, the government was supposed to reassign palm oil plantations to villages that owned the land they occupied.
In the first decade of the new millennium, 21,000 village planters farmed 109,000 hectares of oil palm trees in the region, but they were mostly non-indigenous people and foreign nationals. In effect, these non-indigenous Baoulé and immigrant Mossi, Dagari and Burkinabé altered the ethnic balance of land control when they moved into predominantly Kroumen areas. This ethnicization of land relationships tipped what was initially purely economic tension over into the political arena. Kouamé (Reference Kouamé2010: 128) observes a similar ethnicization of land relations in Aboure territory, with the rise of pineapple cultivation. In Tabou, indigenous Kroumen, Neyo and Bakoué frustration was exacerbated by the fact that their urban returnee children no longer had access to land.Footnote 6 This had an irritant effect and made them feel as if they had been expropriated from their own land and spurned. These frustrations fuelled differences of opinion relating to land exchange methods and provided the rationale for reclaiming possession of land which lies at the root of many land conflicts in the forest regions of the West. Land tenure issues as a source of political crisis in Africa are not specific to Côte d'Ivoire and have also been observed in South Africa (Andrew Reference Andrew2009) and Kenya (Médard Reference Médard2009). However, in Côte d'Ivoire the crisis was fuelled by the 1999 act relating to land tenure.
The nationalist land law ‘solution’
In order to provide a commensurate response to intercommunal tensions and conflicts relating to land, and to compensate for the weakness of previous measures (the decree of 1935, the order of 1943, the order of 1955, the circular of 1968 and Law No.71-338 of July 1971), the Ivoirian state launched a Rural Land Plan (Plan rural foncier, PFR) in 1989. The plan aimed to clarify land rights based on a clear understanding of current rights, developed plots, village lands and the network of relationships between indigenous, non-indigenous and immigrant communities in relation to land management. Although this plan was implemented in over 700 villages in the north, west, east and central areas, it failed to ease tensions in the countryside (Bouquet Reference Bouquet2005). In order to provide a rapid and appropriate response to continuing conflicts, the government initiated Law 98-750, the Rural Land Act.
Passed unanimously by the National Assembly on 23 December 1998, the law reserves rural land ownership for Ivoirians (Article 1). Provision is made for an initial 10-year probationary period during which all holders of land rights implying appropriation of land (excluding indirect modes of tenure) must have their rights recognized and obtain an individual or joint land registration certificate. At the end of this period, land will be registered in the name of the state and the farmer will become a tenant (Articles 3.4 and 5). Non-Ivoirian farmers can only obtain a promise of a long lease from the indigenous holders of land registration certificates, or if they are listed as ‘occupants in good faith’, or from the state if the land is registered to the state (Article 26).
Rather than easing tensions, the ideology of ivoirité Footnote 7 contained in this act escalated the conflicts from an inter-ethnic to a national scale, setting Ivoirians against foreign nationals (Babo and Droz Reference Babo and Droz2008). At this level elites played a crucial role in the nationalist interpretation of the act. Prior to the vote on the law, political and intellectual cadres as well as parliamentary delegations returned to their people to explain the issues at stake. On these occasions, the bill operated as a form of electoral clientelism, to the extent that the issue of control over land has now become the main feature of the return to electoral politics here, as in many African countries (Boone Reference Boone2009). During the 1990 and 1995 elections, politicians' speeches encouraged indigenous people from the forest regions to believe that the rise to power of the opposition leader Gbagbo would lead to the expropriation of land from non-native and non-indigenous peoples and its subsequent reallocation. By taking up the ‘land for indigenous people’ sloganFootnote 8 incorporated in the Land Act on the eve of the 2000 presidential, legislative and municipal elections, politicians aimed to attract voters while reinforcing the principle of reclaiming land that had been worked by indigenous people for several years.
The clashes in 1999 between Ivoirian nationals and foreign nationals – in particular between the Bété and Burkinabé in Saïoua in the central-west region and between the Kroumen and Burkinabé in Tabou – were fuelled by disagreements over the interpretation of land ownership rights, which were now linked to the nationality of the land user. The socio-political nature of the crises relating to land tenure assumed a national dimension when recriminations and violence observed in Tabou in Kroumen territory targeting non-native Burkinabé also occurred in 2001 in Aboure territory (Kouamé Reference Kouamé2010). From this perspective, public policies relating to foreign nationals provide a pertinent analytical framework from which to gain an understanding of these attitudes.
IMMIGRATION POLICIES: FROM OPENNESS TO CLOSURE
From 1960 to 1990: the rejection of an open approach to national identity
Law 61-415 of 14 December 1961 incorporating the Nationality Act formalized the creation of an Ivoirian nationality. This act promoted jus soli for non-nationals in numerous articles (6, 17–23, 105) by prioritizing two essential criteria for attribution of nationality, namely filiation and birth in Côte d'Ivoire. Given the history of the nation and its aim of creating a true nation, the act had to ‘try to create a climate in which foreign nationals would not suffer’.Footnote 9
In a bid to strengthen his policy for integrating peoples whose daily activities transcended state borders, President Houphouët subsequently initiated a dual nationality bill. In 1963 – two years after the drafting of the Nationality Act – Houphouët-Boigny said of foreign nationals: ‘they are at home here, and we will enter into negotiations with their political leaders with a view to granting them dual nationality’ (Amondji Reference Amondji1984: 310). This resulted in an agreement on dual nationality signed on 31 December 1965 by governments of countries in the Conseil de l'Entente, the sub-regional grouping comprising Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Upper Volta, Niger and Togo. The first article of this agreement stipulated that nationals of the contracting parties settled in the territory of any of the parties would enjoy the same rights and be subject to the same obligations as the nationals of the so-called ‘host’ state in which they had settled. In 1965, the Ivoirian President announced that dual nationality would be established in all Entente countries on 1 January 1966.
However, reservations expressed by members of the Ivoirian Parliament resulted in the defeat of the dual nationality bill. The act relating to nationality was swiftly subjected to a restrictive amendment. Parliamentary deputies had in fact expressed misgivings in 1961 about the complex nature of nationality as applied to certain trans-border ethnic communities. In this respect, some deputies highlighted the difficulty inherent in distinguishing an Ivoirian (in particular one from the north) from a Malian or Guinean.Footnote 10 Taking these reservations and criticisms into account, the party-state and the legislature put an end to an immigration policy which was deemed to favour foreign nationals.
On 21 January 1966, the PDCI-RDA rejected the dual nationality agreement at its national council. Although it was rejected on the grounds that it posed a threat to national employment, it was also linked to uncertainty surrounding the actual principles of equal rights and of reciprocal treatment of citizens in the various states (Babo Reference Babo and Akindès2010c).
The law makers then took a more restrictive approach and amended the 1961 Nationality Act. Law No. 72-852 of 21 December 1972, modifying the Ivoirian Nationality Act, was therefore characterized by the abrogation inter alia of Articles 17–23 of Law 61-415, effectively ending the principle of jus soli in favour of jus sanguinis, or right of blood. Henceforth, children born after 1972 on Ivoirian soil of immigrant parents would no longer be able to claim Ivoirian nationality under the registration system. Immigrant parents living in Côte d'Ivoire since colonization who had not acquired Ivoirian nationality under the terms of Articles 105 and 106 now faced the prospect that their children would not automatically qualify for Ivoirian nationality despite being born in Côte d'Ivoire.
According to the law makers, it was necessary to harmonize the Nationality Act with civil laws of 1964 and the Minors Act of 1970, while also adapting the bill to current circumstances. In reality, after the defeat of the dual nationality bill, the government had not taken any practical steps to control borders in order to regulate immigration. In fact, the immigrant workforce doubled between 1968 and 1975, as a result of the so-called ‘economic miracle’ in 1970 (Den Tuinder Reference Den Tuinder1978), with a net annual total migration figure of 2.5 per cent (Tapinos 2003).
The review of the Nationality Act in 1972 after the rejection of dual nationality marks the end of a policy of total openness. Furthermore, two decades after the amendment of the Nationality Act, the introduction of the resident's permit (carte de séjour) in the early 1990s, with pernicious consequences, left many immigrants unsure of their status.
Democratic stirrings and rifts
Côte d'Ivoire, like many other African countries, experienced the effects of the winds of democratic change after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the La Baule Conference in 1990. At the same time, it was also facing a severe economic crisis. The challenging economic climate led the government to introduce an austerity plan in 1989. Measures to implement wage cuts, among others, brought the population out in protest on the streets of the capital, Abidjan. However, social and corporate demands were swiftly replaced by calls for the establishment of democracy.
In 1990, the Ivoirian state decided to resolve its financial imbalances crisis by capitalizing on its large immigrant population. Thus, Law 90-437 of 29 May 1990 relating to the entry and residence of foreign nationals introduced a residence permit (carte de séjour) for all foreign nationals over 16 years of age who had been resident in Côte d'Ivoire for more than three months (Article 6), in breach of the May 1982 protocol of the citizenship code of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Although the architects of this law argued that they were focusing purely on the economy and on modernizing the civil state, it provided legal sanction for a policy of ‘them’ and ‘us’ for the first time since Côte d'Ivoire became independent. From a nation-building perspective, the modernization programme incorporated in this law would bring about a blurring of ethnic distinctions (Deutsch Reference Deutsch1969; Anderson Reference Anderson1983). Furthermore, it had the advantage of drawing a line under informal measures by instituting legal instruments to distinguish between nationals and non-nationals. It also offered a secure basis from which to engage in social and economic activities. This residence permit, valid for one year with an option for renewal, entitled the holder to work and to interact with civil society in the usual manner: hold a driving licence, own a registered company, enrol in an educational establishment, perform bank transactions, have water and electricity utility accounts and a telephone, and so on. However the cost of the residence permit (CFA francs 5,000 per person) was felt to be too high by large, poor, immigrant families, who were bearing the full brunt of the economic crisis. This factor was one of the causes of residence permit fraud.
Fraud subsequently escalated in the run-up to the presidential elections in 1995. It assumed a political dimension based on suspicions voiced by the PDCI-RDA concerning the RDR. This party had been considered to be the ‘foreigner’ party by many PDCI supporters since its creation. Its first secretary-general was accused of being a ‘foreigner’ and wrongfully disqualified from standing in the general election. Like him, many Ivoirians from the north were victims of abuse and endured acts of violence and humiliation by virtue of being associated with the large immigrant presence there. This was particularly true for Burkinabé, who had obtained national identity cards in rather ill-defined circumstances for the 1990 general election (Dozon Reference Dozon, Contamin and Memel-Fotê1997). Their cards were torn up during checks by the police, who told them to obtain residence permits. The residence permit gradually became a political instrument to strip people of their citizenship and a means of disbarring voters and candidates from the electoral process. New cases of Ivoirian nationality fraud came to light relating to restoring citizenship that had previously been granted but was now being refused on an increasingly frequent basis.
In 1994, President Bédié's government took the decision to resolve the issue of Ivoirian identity. In order to achieve this on the basis of the ideology of ivoirité, it launched a huge campaign to distinguish between ‘Ivoirians with roots going back for centuries’Footnote 11 and ‘ad hoc Ivoirians’.Footnote 12 The political concept behind this ideology, whose aim was to establish a new relationship with ‘otherness’, resulted in an immigration policy which was both restrictive and non-inclusive, favouring proponents of the principle of jus sanguinis. For ideologues of ivoirité inspired by primordialist beliefs in a nation founded on blood relationships (Geertz Reference Geertz and Geertz1963), indigenous status is the main criterion for discrimination in terms of obtaining access to political power and in particular to increasingly scarce economic resources. According to the 1998 Land Act, the right to own land now belonged to Ivoirian nationals. Control over land placed an updated version of the identity issue firmly back on the agenda.
THE IMPLICATIONS OF IDENTITY FOR THE LAND TENURE CRISIS
Differing interpretations of land law that enshrine customary principles
The new Land Act of 1998 granted rural land ownership exclusively to individuals and companies holding Ivoirian nationality. This act was perceived both by the elite and the farming masses as surrendering the land to indigenous peoples. This idea, which was carefully propagated among the population by political leaders (MPs, ministers, directors, et cetera) had a disastrous effect on relationships between indigenous communities on the one hand and non-indigenous and immigrant communities on the other hand.
First, at the level of land exchanges, although the act restored the status and roles of indigenous landowners, it definitively clarified the fluid relationship with land of all immigrants and non-indigenous people, such as the Baoulé in the west and south-west, by putting an end to the oppressive tutorat system and providing them with administrative documents. However, according to the act, obtaining papers entailed close collaboration or even agreements with indigenous tuteurs. It restored the key role of indigenous people in the process of clarifying land ownership. From this position of influence, indigenous people who could not recover land that had been farmed for many years by foreign immigrants hoped to extract as much financial gain as possible from the 1998 act and its implementation. This involved the eventual commodification of their agreements and statements in return for recognition of the land rights of immigrants seeking to obtain land tenure documents.Footnote 13 By contrast, for foreign nationals, strict application of the act legalized a form of abuse, since some people had actually paid money in exchange for land. In fact, after all the gifts and assistance of all kinds usually made to customary owners under a tutorat agreement, immigrant farmers were loath to accept that they had to pay further rent or charges for a long lease to the very same people, now recognized as legal owners.
The act also raised the issue of the right of descendants of the first immigrants to inherit their parents' plantations. This significant group of non-Ivoirian land users could not own the land they farmed, especially since it would revert after ten years to an Ivoirian or the state. The act therefore effectively dispossessed them. In the countryside, indigenous peoples believed that the act only recognized the first occupants with whom their own parents made agreements in the forms of gifts, free transfer or sales. Therefore, in their view, the descendants of the first immigrants should not inherit their plantations after death. In villages in Tabou and Méagui, young people expressed their belief that ‘their plantations belong to them, but not the land. Our parents gave the land to the first foreigners, but not to their children. If their children want to stay on the plantation, then they must make new agreements with us.’Footnote 14 In fact, in the event of a death, a farmer's heirs who did not actually meet the criteria for land tenure had a three-year deadline before they had to hand over the land or negotiate a long lease (Article 26 of Law No. 98-750 of 23 December 1998). The act did not therefore force customary landholders who had become legal owners to rent their land to the heirs of the deceased land user after the three-year period during which they were entitled to farm it. A situation could therefore arise whereby the owners refused to grant any form of request for rental expressed by the heirs when this deadline expired. By contrast, for some immigrants it seemed quite clear that their descendants who remained in the villages should inherit under the same terms as were fixed with the ancestors of the young indigenous people, since the plantations had been developed by their families. These situations gave rise to very real conflicts.
When all is said and done, the act relating to rural land tenure had a disruptive effect on the social balance. Differing interpretations exacerbated discrimination against immigrants in the countryside. For example, Malian Bozo fishermen were forbidden from fishing, then expelled to Ayamé in the south-east. In Bonoua in the south-east in 2000, immigrants were prohibited without exception from owning land. These discriminatory and xenophobic attitudes proliferated across the country, giving rise to a quasi-permanent state of tension between Ivoirians and immigrants throughout the country. Even naturalized citizensFootnote 15 continued to be the victims of discrimination in so far as indigenous status assumed a local meaning of a close bond with the native land, which ran deeper than mere place of birth (Geschiere Reference Geschiere2009).
Thus, in 2002, the government launched an identification exercise based on Law 2002-03 of 3 January 2002, in which citizens were required to go and register in their native village. Naturalized citizens, who were deemed to be ad hoc or ‘false’ Ivoirians, were denied the customary tenure for land to which they had no right on the basis of blood ties or territoriality.
In the forest regions of the west, tensions between communities relating to land had already caused indigenous people to feel cut off from their land. These feelings provoked the emergence of a group consciousness in response to economic and social domination by migrants, perceived as constituting an external threat. Under these circumstances, the group reacted by marshalling elements such as ethnic origins and region as the basis for identity. This change relating to identity against a backdrop of disagreements over land resembles social processes observed elsewhere in the context of conflict and uncertainty, when identity is reduced to narrower and more restrictive categories based on ethnicity (Allemand Reference Allemand and Ruano-Borbalan1998) or community belonging to a homeland (territoire d'origine). In Côte d'Ivoire, the way in which policy relating to non-nationals insinuated itself into land policy was the main feature of the Land Act of 1998. The way in which these policies were manipulated would become apparent on the ground in Tabou.
Public policy in inter-community conflict in Tabou
The restrictions imposed by public policies on foreign nationals, pursued since 1990, made them a focus of hostility, xenophobia and discriminatory acts. These acts were part of a broader political context of acute crisis (coup d’état, attempted coups d’état, elections, land disputes) and demonstrated the impact of public policies that sanctioned stigmatization of foreign nationals throughout the country after the death of the first Ivoirian president, Houphouët-Boigny (Cutolo Reference Cutolo2010). In Tabou, the reappropriation of these policies by the ‘customary administration’ (Jacob Reference Jacob, Kuba, Lentz and Somda2003) favoured the expulsion of Burkinabé planters.
After a 120-hectare plot of land was reclaimed from the Hompo in the village of Besséréké, 25 km from Tabou, conflict broke out, resulting in the death of a member of the indigenous community. As soon as the clashes broke out, government representatives – including presidential advisers, ministers, senior army and police officers, prefects and sub-prefects – undertook mediation initiatives. However, the representative of political leaders in the region, who in this instance was the deputy for Tabou, states that ‘the violation of the sacred taboo, according to which the blood of a son of this region must not be shed by Dagari and Lobi from Burkina Faso over a land claim in the village of Besséreké, demands that they be banished completely. That they should all leave’ (Fraternité Matin, 17 November 1999, p. 2).
Faced with this intransigent attitude, the government turned to the customary authorities. Emboldened, however, by the radical position of their political leaders (who had just campaigned for and passed a land act in a spirit of ‘national protection’), the customary chiefs opted to expel the Burkinabé. The spokesman for the customary chiefs of the Tabou District told government representativesFootnote 16 in no uncertain terms: ‘We are giving all these Dagari and Lobi farmers one week to leave our region; we will not tolerate them on our territory any longer.’Footnote 17 Sikor and Lund (Reference Sikor and Lund2009: 14) point out that ‘when institutions operate to enforce particular claims and hence particular ideas about property … it does not exclude the use of physical force’. Indeed, force, violence, physical presence, eviction, land grabbing, resistance, attrition, and so on, are at the base or origin of most property regimes. The Kroumen therefore used violence to expel ‘foreigners’ and destroy their property in the form of dwellings and plantations.
In reality, the two public policies presented above provided the justification for these customary authorities. First, the decisive factor motivating their actions is the status of ‘foreigners’, one of the parties involved in the conflict, as enshrined in the Nationality Act. Second, these ‘foreigners’ are not, and cannot be, ‘owners’ of the land that they farm under the provisions of the Land Act. The emphasis placed on the identity factor in the Tabou land conflict can be explained by the recourse of customary chiefs to criteria relating to the ethnic frontiers, as is clearly stipulated in Land Act, and more insidiously in the Nationality Act. As emphasized by Lentz (Reference Lentz, Kuba, Lentz and Somda2003), the distinction between ‘indigenous peoples’ and ‘foreigners’ sometimes fuelled arguments justifying privileged access to economic resources such as land, and claiming authority based on the principle of first settlement.
In the case of the killing of a member of the indigenous community in Besséréké in November 1999, it is possible to observe a form of reinvention of tradition in which the traditional rules of conflict management are adapted to modern times. In fact, by opting to banish outsiders, the Kroumen custom offered a form of moral satisfaction that aimed to ease family resentments through sacrifice and ritual (Girard Reference Girard1972). It is clear that the sanction is not restricted to the perpetrator, but extends to his entire community. Attitudes towards changing customs and/or the automatic solidarity existing within an ethnic or national group offer approaches for an understanding of the significance of these events.
Firstly, customary law, although quite general, was not clear on the subject of the foreign perpetrator, thus opening the door to every kind of interpretation and manipulation. The same is true at the level of traditional institutions. Kroumen society is characterized by a lack of social and political hierarchy and the absence of a supreme customary jurisdiction. In everyday life, management of land disputes normally fell within the scope of the traditional regulation of village matters. The head of the family or the head of the village and his notables resolved disputes. Subsequently, the matter could be brought before a tribal chief for arbitration if one of the parties was dissatisfied with the verdict. Yet in the wake of the November 1999 killing, a special central jurisdiction was established and the conflict management body was extended to all traditional indigenous authorities. In fact, the heads of all the ‘tribes’ in the Tabou département gathered together to form a ‘high customary tribunal’ set up for the occasion in the Bapo village of Djamateké.Footnote 18 Highlighting the Kroumen tradition of the sacred taboo, according to which not one drop of the blood of a son of the region must be shed by anybody for whatever reason, the decision was taken to expel Burkinabé nationals (Dagari and Lobi) from all Kroumen villages for seven years.
However, in 2006, contrary to custom, Hompo villagers refused to enter into negotiations regarding the return of the people who had been expelled, and demonstrated their reluctance to allow the Burkinabé to resettle. Although, according to custom, exiled people could be reintegrated into the community following a period of exclusion and after paying certain penalties and making sacrifices, the Kroumen refused to apply these arrangements to the Burkinabé. Indigenous people believed that the Burkinabé were implicated in the war in Côte d'Ivoire that began in September 2002 (see Babo Reference Babo2010b). Land chiefs, village chiefs and tribal heads, as well as groups of young people, henceforth defended the idea of banishing the Burkinabé on a permanent basis. They reiterated the mantras ‘let them go home’ or ‘we will not tolerate their return’.Footnote 19 In 2010, 11 years after the expulsions, despite an improvement in diplomatic relations between Côte d’ Ivoire and Burkina Faso, and concerted attempts on the part of the Ivoirian Minister for National Reconciliation, Burkinabé were still experiencing difficulties in returning to their plantations. In this way, the incident of the murder of a member of the Kroumen community by a foreign national gave rise to the invention of a modified form of customary law.
CONCLUSION
In Côte d'Ivoire, as in Ghana or Burkina Faso (Jacob Reference Jacob2004; Kuba Reference Kuba2004), indigenous populations make repeated reference to the figure of the foreign national or migrant during land disputes in order to bolster their claims and strategies for reinforcing institutional control over the land. In the Tabou conflict, the Kroumen mobilized all their customary institutions to affirm their authority as an ethnic group over the territory, its resources, and all the other foreign communities. This was expressed through three mechanisms: (1) expulsions of the Dagari and Lobi from all Kroumen tribal territories, accompanied by the destruction of their property; (2) occupation and exploitation of their cocoa and oil palm plantations; and (3) the transfer of some plantations to new applicants, notably new Baoulé migrants, under sharecropping arrangements known as boussan.
The Land Act of 1998, the Nationality Act of 1972 and Law 90-437 of 29 May 1990 relating to the entry and residence of foreign nationals in Côte d'Ivoire all provide a backdrop to the decisions and actions which regulated this conflict. According to Sikor and Lund (Reference Sikor and Lund2009: 8), ‘property rights have something in common with citizen rights as two fundamental aspects of social life: what we have and what we are – avoir and être’. In fact, the Ivoirian Land Act of 1998 actually introduced the concept of ‘what we are and what we own’ to the extent that being was henceforth equated with owning. ‘Being’ is linked to nationality based on jus sanguinis. For defenders of jus soli, inspired by constructivist theories (Anderson Reference Anderson1983 and Deutsch Reference Deutsch1969), the nation is a socio-historical phenomenon created by social groups, irrespective of the strength of a sense of attachment to an ethnic group or territory. This explains why Zoro (Reference Zoro2003) is critical of the architects of ivoirité and of public policy inspired by this ideology. He states that determining national origins purely on a tribal or ethnic basis is equivalent to denying the dynamic of peoples, fostering ethnocentrism and working counter to the emergence of a feeling a national unity.
As we have seen, the pernicious effects of two public policies entailed the deconstruction of the notion of a ‘stranger-brother’ in the social imagination in favour of an ‘indigenous citizen’. This is expressed first and foremost by an absolute conception of the ‘foreigners’ (extra-ethnic and extra-national) and by the assertion of the exclusive right of the indigenous population to access scarce economic resources such as land. Thus in the context of an economic crisis, the first-settler principle which inspired advocates of the theory of founding tribes contained in the concept of ivoirité became more current in populations searching for an identity with its roots in blood kinship, language, region and custom.
Changes in the social and political environment have played a major role in these policy changes. The introduction of democracy actually served to reawaken old resentments among the population of the forest regions. When the PDCI-RDA fell from power in 1999, it was obvious that the Kroumen were trying to recover their diminished or unenforced rights to property and their authority through their conflict with the Burkinabé. Laws relating to nationality and land lent legitimacy to their sometimes violent actions. Reclaiming institutional control over land demonstrates that although they were not benefiting directly from resources being exploited by foreign nationals, they had not surrendered their rights to ownership and traditional institutional control. The reverse is in fact true. The violent way in which they reasserted their status as masters of the land responsible for regulating land law (ownership, access, use, et cetera) demonstrates that circumstances such as the collapse of public enterprise and changes in institutions and/or political regimesFootnote 20 can bring new vigour to these laws, which hitherto had been considered enfeebled. Finally, as is highlighted by Lund (Reference Lund2011: 7), land policies explicitly or implicitly articulate the relationships existing in the allocation of power between the state, citizens and authorities operating local systems. At the same time, the weaknesses inherent in these land policies mean that they can be manipulated, notably in an electoral context, as is the case in Zimbabwe (Boone and Kriger Reference Boone and Kriger2010).
Thus, land ownership remains a highly sensitive issue in the village setting, where it is still linked in people's minds to nationality. In forest zones, the question ‘To whom does the land belong?’ is currently a topic for concern that lies at the root of the tension between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and immigrants. The war experienced by the country has exacerbated the situation. Recent massacres in March 2011 in the west of Côte d'Ivoire during the post-electoral crisis are not purely a manifestation of a struggle for political power, but also of a ‘land war’. In Grabo and Tabou (in the extreme south-west) primarily due to the lack of state authority under successive regimes (PDCI-RDA, military junta and then FPI), foreign nationals were expelled from their plantations, which were occupied from 1999 by indigenous Kroumen. Conversely, since the outbreak of the revolt in 2002 and the start of the current RDR regime supported by this very revolt and by many Burkinabé auxiliary forces, land and cocoa and coffee plantations have changed hands. In the west of Côte d'Ivoire – in particular in Duékoué, Touleupleu, Bloléquin and Guiglo – indigenous Guéré plantations are now occupied by Burkinabé foreign nationals. Despite the end of the war in April 2011, this remains the most unstable region in the country, largely on account of land ownership disputes. The current situation, which is termed an ‘invasion’ by the indigenous Guéré people because of the influx of Burkinabé and their violent and illegal occupation of villages and plantations in the region, supports this thesis.Footnote 21
Therefore, one of the key areas that must be addressed by the new power is the volatile issue of land tenure in the forest regions of the west. To this end, the experimental phase of applying the law through demarcation of plots and assignment of land deeds to land users in the Soubré and Divo regions and in Tabou is one possible solution to be explored.
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL
This article was translated from French by Marianne Chalmers. The original French version ‘Les politiques publiques dans la crise en Côte d'Ivoire: la loi foncière prise au piège de la nationalité dans les communautés rurales de Tabou’ is available via the journal website at http://journals.cambridge.org/AFR.
