Class and Culture in a Peasant Economy: The Transformation of Land Tenure in Barolong

Abstract

Consider these apparently simple facts: in 1968, the Government of Botswana introduced its Tribal Land Act, which promulgated new institutional and tenurial arrangements for the rural communities; in the period thereafter land regulations in Barolong, a small chiefdom in the south-eastern corner of the country, underwent dramatic changes. Most obvious among these were a rapid rise in the value of cultivable acreages, a marked shift in the ideology of property rights, and an intense politicisation of the processes surrounding the distribution and negotiation of arable holdings. Given the historical coincidence of these events, it might seem perfectly reasonable to infer a causal link between them. And, indeed, the direct attribution of rural transformations of this kind to the effects of state intervention is common enough in analyses of “social change” and “development”. But, tempting as this mode of explanation might be, it leads inexorably to oversimplification. Worse still, it is often predicated upon the patently false assumption that the temporal conjunction of such decontextualised events may alone represent a sufficient condition for hypothesising causal connections between them.