This book explores how customary institutions, citizens, and chiefs impact the expansion of state control over land, determining how state capacity grows and why it is spatially uneven. It shows that, by influencing how chiefs and citizens weigh competing incentives in their decisions, customary institutions can divert the outcomes intended by state policy or predicted by market forces. Local power dynamics and the agency of members of customary institutions are thus critical to understanding both the resilience of customary land tenure regimes and the continuing influence of customary institutions in citizens’ lives. Chapter 8 concludes the book by examining the broader implications of these findings for the contemporary role of customary institutions as intermediaries between citizen and state; the political determinants of property rights; and land titling policies.

Chapter 2 provides a historical look at the processes and events that shaped local perceptions of gender and development. Development invoked a variety of memories, emotions, and perspectives for the residents of Nampula. I group these understandings around three themes: development as freedom and liberty; development in terms of citizen–state relations; and development as ‘projects’. While people were generally positive about the increased stability and freedom they experienced after the civil war, they were more sceptical of development projects, which increased exponentially in the rebuilding years following the Rome General Peace Accords in 1992. People in rural Nampula interpreted the handpump within a history of colonial, state-led, and neoliberal approaches that primarily served the interests of domestic and international elites and disrupted rural social relations and livelihoods. Throughout the book, the discourses that animate development projects are in tension with those that circulate within the villages of Nampula.