ABSTRACT
Introduction Among the nations of sub-Saharan Africa, Botswana offers a fruitful case study of the postcolonial tensions between communal and individual land tenure, seen through the prism of rapid peri-urban growth. The peri-urban space in Botswana provides the area at which indigenous land administration systems, creations of pre-capitalist formations, interface with received or capitalist and market-based systems found in the urban areas. In recent years, housing shortages and speculative land developers in urban areas have exerted intense pressure on Tribal Land Boards (TLBs) in adjacent tribal areas. The creation of TLBs can be viewed as indicative of the new nation-State’s commitment to safeguarding access to land for its citizens in communal areas. It is the combined presence of land shortages in urban areas and the availability of relatively free land in communal areas that has created complex and disputed land transactions in the peri-urban space. Claims and counter-claims of ‘self-allocation’ have generated different responses from government, moving from tacit accommodation (as in the case of Old Naledi) to, more recently, ‘zero tolerance’ (as in the case of Mogoditshane).
