Land, Gender and Ethnicity: A Feminist Critique of Land Distribution and Identity in Uganda?

In many African states like Uganda, access to and control of land are a deeply politicized gendered issue. This paper explores the historical and structural forces that have shaped this reality. It is “who you are” that determines whether you have access to and control of land in the contemporary era. Why? Land today is distributed or accessed on basis of gender, ethnicity. Class and age too especially regarding financial ability to acquire land given its exposure to market forces, although these are not the focus of the paper. Rights to land in Africa stem from many different sources, such as first settlement, conquest, allocation by government, long occupation or market transaction (Toulmin 2009). In this paper, I employ feminist historical materialism as both method and lens to trace how colonialism, capitalism and state power jointly structure exclusion of control over land. The approach centres material conditions through narratives relating to land tenure, birth and inheritance systems and how these intersect with gender and ethnicity to reproduce inequality. Dressing gender inequality in land access requires decolonial thinking that centres social justice, privileges access over exclusion and collectivity over individualism.