ABSTRACT
The analysis of the clusters of rights and claims, privileges and liabilities which are related to the ways in which Africans hold and work the land, live on it and use its products, is complex, on the one hand, because of the difficulties in evaluating the exact nature of the rights and claims, and on the other hand, because of the imbrication of economic and social, political and religious factors. It is, therefore, difficult to characterize African systems of land-tenure in terms of familiar legal and linguistic concepts.
