Introduction

In 1999 and 2000, just as the government passed its new Land Act and Village Land Act (in legal force since May 2001 (Alden Wily 2003, 13), I carried out fieldwork on changing land tenure practices in Kinyanambo village, Mufindi District (Iringa Region), in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania.2 Kinyanambo is located in the north-eastern part of the Mufindi Plateau (1700m to 2000m in altitude, 950mm annual rainfall (MDC 1997, 9-13)) and lies along the Tanzam highway, which links Dar-es-Salaam to Zambia, immediately north of the district's capital, Mafinga town. The area has experienced rapid change since Mafinga was first established during compulsory villagization in 1974 (incorporating part of Kinyanambo's land), and increasingly so during the current period of structural adjustment and liberalization.

The Southern Highlands saw quite high levels of non-African settlement during the British colonial period and Mufindi, with its relatively fertile soils and favourable climate, has attracted substantial foreign investment over time. Non-African settlers moved to the Mufindi highlands (an area now well-known for its tea plantations) from 1926; land alienations in Kinyanambo's immediate vicinity, an area known as the ‘Sao area’, began shortly thereafter. A large non-African settlement scheme was established in the Sao area in 1937 and much of its land later became part of the government's plantation forest at Sao Hill, where a saw mill was built in the late 1970s. A pyrethrumprocessing factory was also built in the late 1970s in Kinyanambo itself (Daley 2004, 79–90, 93–7, 150–3, 174–5, 182–3; cf. Blue Book 1926; 1937).

My fieldwork in Kinyanambo included key informant interviews with 24 women and 30 men, a socio-economic survey of 156 houses (my first survey), a land transaction survey of 61 houses (my second survey), a review of local land and court records, and numerous contextual interviews with local officials, businesspeople and the like. My two surveys addressed the ‘economic unit’, the smallest economic grouping in each sampled physical ‘house’, which usually comprised the resident nuclear family (the core economic group of the head of that house) and did not always equate to the ‘household’, a conjugal and/or familial and social entity which sometimes consisted of multiple economic units spread between one or more houses. I therefore distinguish between economic units and the ‘household head’ of the households in which they lay (Daley 2004, 49, 172, 276–84).