Land policy development in East Africa: A survey of recent trends

Abstract

Land policy in East Africa has had an extremely colourful history. Although firmly rooted in a common foundation cast by the Berlin Conferences of 1884-85 that sanctioned the partition of Africa among the European powers, actual development of land policy on the ground in the three countries of Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika) Uganda, and Kenya (briefly East Africa), parted ways soon thereafter and for nearly a century remained radically different in each jurisdiction. The primary reason for this was that although the assumption of imperial jurisdiction over these territories came almost simultaneously at the close of the 19th century, the ‘constitutional’ effect thereof varied both with the actual political formations in existence in each context, and the immediate needs and concerns of the imperial authority.