ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the nature of title to real property before colonisation of Southern African Development Community (SADC). It shows that the land issue in affected SADC States appears to be an equal and opposite reaction to the legal violence that alienated native people from their land and forced them into wage earners from the new landlords and to be “squatters” in the land of their forefathers. Anthropology shows that, for a long time different cultures have held different notions of land rights. All claims must first be submitted to the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights, whose role is to investigate the merits of claims and attempt to settle them through mediation. Besides instituting a system of inequitable land distribution, conversion from oral to recorded governance, ushered in also the concept of private ownership of land that firmly opposes the philosophy that has characterised land use in pre-colonial SADC States, humwe.
