By Dave Manneh | Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)
Legal Notice 2 of 1994, made under section 5(1) of the State Lands Act, carries two operative sentences and a schedule of boundaries. The second designates Kombo North, Kombo South and Kombo Central as State lands with effect from the first day of March 1994. It recites no purchase, no conquest, no inheritance and no consent. One page in the Gazette, and three districts changed landlords on paper.
Part One set down the premise and its proof: the state asserted title to the land of the former Protectorate and never held it. This essay reads the machinery of the assertion, the two devices Part One promised: the designated areas, and the deeming of customary holders into lessees. I take the Act in the order its drafters arranged it, and I quote it as printed.
What Designation Does
The power sits in section 5(1): “The Minister may, by order published in the Gazette, designate any regions land for the purpose of this Act.” Mark the object of the power. The Act does not target vacant land or state holdings. Regionsland belongs to the communities. The Lands (Regions) Act vests it in the District Authorities to hold and administer for the use and common benefit of those communities. Designation operates on land the law already assigned to custodians for the people living on it.
Section 5(2) then does two things at once. Upon designation, “all land in the area shall, excluding such land as is held in fee simple, vest in and be administered by the State for the use and common benefit, direct or indirect of the community in which the land is situated”, and “the Lands (Regions) Act, shall not apply to the areas”.
Read the pair together. Paragraph (b) dismisses the custodian statute. Paragraph (a) carries the custodian’s formula across intact, with the State now administering. The swap replaces the trustee and keeps the trust. Nothing in either paragraph conveys ownership, because the duty survives the transfer: whoever administers, the benefit belongs to the community on the land.
The drafters knew how to write ownership when they meant it. One section earlier, the Act vests land in Banjul and what is now Kanifing Municipality in the State absolutely. That word appears once, for the old Colony core, and the Act withholds it from every designated area. The Act’s own definition confirms the distinction: State land includes land acquired by or on behalf of the State, a category separate from land designated. The state’s claim to the communal lands of those three districts rests on designation, and designation recites no acquisition.
The state’s own land governance assessment, prepared under the World Bank framework and written to repair the system rather than question it, reads the section the same way: designation, its record states, makes the State the “legal trustee” of designated land in the district authority’s place. Cited for that record alone, and against its purpose, it settles the point. A trustee administers what belongs to others.
What Deeming Does
Now the people on the land. Section 7(1): “A person who holds any land in a designated area under customary tenure or year to year tenancy shall, at the date on which the area is designated and subject to the provisions of this Act, be deemed to be a lessee of the land.” Section 7(2): “A deemed lessee shall be deemed to hold the land from the State”. Read the grammar slowly. The first deeming invents a tenancy. The second invents the landlord.
A lease is a grant from an owner to a tenant; here the statute forges both signatures and dates the instrument to the designation itself.
On the first of March 1994, the landowning Kabilolu of Kombo North, Kombo South and Kombo Central who had held their ground since before the Protectorate went to sleep as owners under their own law and woke as tenants of a state that never bought the land from them and who never offered it for sale.
Section 6 reaches backward for the leases that already existed. Any lease granted under the predecessor Acts and still subsisting at the Act’s commencement takes effect as if its term were ninety-nine years from its original date, on the Act’s conditions, and “subject to such rent as may from time to time be determined by the Minister”.
The 1970 coastal leases Part One documented are such leases: granted by the District Authorities to the Minister. The Act re-papers them and hands the rent pen to the tenant’s own office. The landlord under those instruments now waits on its lessee to name the rent.
The ladder has rungs further down. Section 7(5) lets the Minister gazette a deadline within which all deemed lessees in an area shall apply for and be granted title deeds. Section 7(6) supplies the fall: whoever misses it “shall cease to be a deemed lessee and shall be deemed to hold the land as tenant at will of the State and may at any time thereafter be dispossessed thereof”.
A third deeming, and the harshest. Miss an administrative date and the ancestral holder becomes a tenant at will, removable at pleasure, on land no one ever acquired from him. Section 7(7) strips the community even of the question of who holds under customary law, handing any such dispute to the Department of Lands and Surveys, which may seek the views of the relevant District Tribunal. The office that answers to the landlord decides who the landlord’s tenants are.
The 1995 Regulations complete the circuit. The deemed lessee must apply for the lease the Act says he already holds, satisfy conditions for its grant, and pay a premium, which the Regulations define as a charge levied on a grantee or deemed lessee. Deemed, then invoiced.
None of this machinery explained itself to the people whose tenure it rewrote: the Law Reform Commission’s own commissioned study of the period records administrators and communities alike unsure whether the 1991 Acts had turned them into tenants. And the device is older than the Act. A 1945 ordinance deemed occupiers of unleased Colony land yearly tenants of the State; a 1980 amendment terminated those tenancies and left those who missed its window as squatters facing ejection; 1991 deemed again. The instrument carries colonial fingerprints, re-inked.
On the ground, the state’s own record concedes, the district authorities and the alkalolu still administer the designated land, and transfers still take their endorsement. The paper changed the landlord and the land kept its own law. Who staffs that relay, how it was built between citizen and land, and what must stand in its place, is the work of Part Three.
The Assertion Is the Title
Step outside the Act’s terms now, as Part One did. The designation acquired nothing. The deeming consented to nothing. The holder never signed, the community never surrendered, the state never acquired; the statute wrote the parties into the roles it required and called the casting a conveyance. And the Act understood the weakness of its own foundation, because it legislated against ever having to prove it.
Section 27: in every action where title to land is in issue, “the averment that any land is State land, shall be sufficient without proof of such fact, unless the defendant proves the contrary”. The claim of ownership is itself the evidence of ownership. The citizen carries the burden of the contrary against a landlord whose title is the sentence asserting it. Part One asked by what right. Section 27 is the statute’s answer, entered on the record: by averment.
In January 2026, the High Court found the Gambia Tourism Board the legal and beneficial proprietor of all designated Tourism Development Areas. It then looked for the instrument that designates the TDA and could not find one. The 1970 leases describe the coastal belt. They say nothing about tourism or tourism development. The same court held that indigenous rights under customary tenure are indefeasible outside such designations.
Six months later, the Minister of Tourism told a stakeholder forum that TDA land belongs to the Government and not the Board, citing title deeds SR No. 18 of 1974 and SR No. P-714 of 1974. The certified copies read P.14/1970 and P.18/1970.
The court and the Minister cannot agree who owns the coast, and neither can name the instrument that created what they claim to own. The owners of the coastal belt are known to all. Their ownership predates the colony, the state, and every statute examined in this essay. The communities never asked either of them.
The machinery is complete, and it is empty. It designates, it deems, it presumes, and at no point does it acquire. The state’s file on the coast is closed. The land’s answer has not changed.
Saama Kanto: the sacred responsibility that predates every statute, every gazette, and every ordinance that ever claimed authority over land our ancestors held before any of them existed. I offer this analysis in that spirit.
A Note on Sources: Statutory quotations are from the State Lands Act, Cap. 57:02, the Lands (Regions) Act, Cap. 57:03, and Legal Notice 2 of 1994, checked against the printed pages of the 2009 revised edition. The LGAF report (Amie Bensouda and Co, 2013) is cited and read against its reformist purpose. Freudenberger’s Working Paper No. 40 (2000) records the confusion that met the 1991 Acts.
GTB v Jeng (HC/519/19/CL/177/C1, January 2026) is cited for its findings on TDA proprietorship and customary tenure. The ministerial forum is reported in The Voice, 14 July 2026. Part One and the certified copies are at https://securing-futures.org/research/publications
About this Series: Before the State is a series of essays by Dave Manneh, Founder and Research Lead of Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC). Where the preceding trilogy, The Architecture of Predation in The Gambia (SFLRAC, 2026), documented how predatory land governance operates and how communities resist it, this series interrogates the premise on which that architecture rests: the state’s claim to own the land. The full research archive is available at https://securing-futures.org/research/publications
