Land Rights and the Forest Peoples of Africa

Land rights and the forest peoples of Africa – Part I
what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common
for others. 16
Here Locke’s theory of property ownership can be seen to rely on a distinction between land
in a ‘state of Nature’ and domesticated land which has been adapted by the labours of ‘men’.
As Argyrou writes, ‘mastery of nature came to be seen as the unmistakable mark of
civilisation, the core characteristic not of European “man” but of “man” as such. To
paraphrase Marx … “man” makes himself only insofar as he remakes the world around him.
The more he changes the world around him, the more he becomes his true self’. 17
Locke’s theories have had two fundamental impacts on indigenous peoples – whether his
theories are understood as causing or rationalising European behaviour towards them. First,
as will be elaborated below, Locke’s theories deny indigenous peoples their rights of
ownership, individually or collectively, of their ancestral lands. They legitimise the
appropriation of these lands by colonial forces, a process of exploitation that continues today
in the denial of indigenous peoples’ rights to the protected areas that were formerly their
homes. Specifically, Locke writes that the failure to apply ones labour denies individuals or
groups the ability to call a good or piece of land their own: ‘if either the grass of his enclosure
rotted on the ground, or the fruit of his planting perished without gathering and laying up,
this part of the earth, notwithstanding his enclosure, was still to be looked on as waste, and
might be the possession of any other’. 18
As Buchan and Heath write, ‘Land use other than settled agriculture was declared “waste”,
rather than industrious and rational use, and incapable of forming the basis of property
rights. This Eurocentric framework establishes indigenous social forms as inferior and
reduces their distinctive features to a derisory comparison with European social forms’. 19 This
concept of ownership through the application of labour was joined by a second theory,
derived from 19th-century evolutionary anthropology, which suggested that
indigenous peoples were seen to be extremely primitive insofar as they apparently did
not have institutions or concepts related to sovereignty or jurisdiction. They could not,
therefore, legally occupy their own lands. Since it could be presumed that the lands were
‘vacant’ from a legal point of view, the Crown could legitimately acquire sovereignty and
jurisdiction merely through placing authorized colonists on the lands. 20
When these two theories were used together they enabled colonial forces to deny the
customary land rights of indigenous peoples formalised through the legal concept of terra
nullius in Australia and Canada, and vacant et sans maîtres (which literally means empty
16 Ibid., p 116.
17 V Argyrou (2005) The logic of environmentalism, p 5.
18 J Locke (1823) The works of John Locke, p 121.
19 B Buchan and M Heath (2006) ‘Savagery and Civilization: From Terra Nullius to the “Tide of History” ’, in
Ethnicities, vol. 6, no. 1, p 8.
20 M Asch (2005) ‘Levi-Strauss and the Political: The Elementary Structures of Kinship and the Resolution of
Relations between Indigenous Peoples and Settler States’, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, vol. 11, no. 3, p 431.
Kidd & Kenrick 9
March 2009