Renegotiating the community and disputing territories: land tenure and ownership in the community lands in the lake Niassa region

Abstract

This paper builds on the experience of implementing community land delimitation in Cóbuè, Niassa province, between 2012 and 2015, and analyses the interface between traditional leaders and customary land systems in Mozambique. The ethnographic material in this paper helps to frame the debates on land and territory, land tenure and ownership, as well as the encounters with territorial history, the impacts of transformations, legislation and demand for land. The paper contributes to the reassessment of the notion of community ownership and the framing of customary land systems when conceiving the territory as a political space.