By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)
August 2026
On 22 and 23 July, at the DPPH hall on Marina Parade in Banjul, the Ministry of Lands convened a workshop on the legal review of The Gambia’s land tenure and land administration laws. The consultant leading the review set out its purpose from the front of the room. The task, the slides said, is to ‘harmonise and modernise’ the statutes that govern land in The Gambia. Fragmentation across eleven laws. Weak institutions. Gaps in registration, in compensation, in the resolution of disputes. Every one of those problems is real, and the review names them accurately.
There is one question the review does not name, and every finding depends on the answer. Does the state own the land these statutes govern? The review does not ask the question. It assumes the answer, treats the land as the state’s to administer, and sets about administering it better. That assumption is the foundation the whole exercise rests on, and the review has never tested it.
The review put the assumption on a slide. Slide 12, headed Priority Reform Areas for Stakeholder Validation, sets out four reform areas. The fourth is Customary Land Governance, and its stated objective is to enhance the interface between customary and statutory tenure systems.
Read that objective for what it takes as given. It casts the matter as two tenure systems that need a better join, the customary and the statutory, each sound on its own ground. But the statutory system’s ground is the very claim in question, that the state owns the land it administers. Frame the task as smoothing an interface, and you have settled the ownership question before the room sits down.
What a lease can and cannot do
Begin with what is not in dispute. Outside the boundaries of the former Colony, the land-owning kabilolu hold their land under ancestral relations that predate the colonial state, the Protectorate, and the independent Republic. A lease grants only the use of that land for a term, and the ancestral title beneath it stays with the kabilolu through every lease and every administrator’s pen.
This is not a sentimental claim about belonging. It is written into the very statutes the review proposes to tidy. Before The State Part One set out where that custody sits: the Lands (Regions) Act vests regional land in the District Authorities to hold ‘for the use and common benefit’ of the communities.
So the question stands. Where did the custodian acquire the ownership it now proposes to administer more efficiently? To answer that, we have to look at how the state came to make the claim at all. The answer is a chain of dates, and the chain does not lead where the review assumes.
A title installed by statute
The oldest land law still on our books is the Land (Registration of Deeds) Act, passed in 1880, before the Protectorate existed. Read its opening definition. It defines land as ‘any estate or interest whatever in real property.’ That single line does a great deal of work.
It takes land, which the communities of this country held as a living relation across generations, and translates it into the English idea of an estate: property owned by one person, measured in interests, transferable by deed.
The kabilo’s relation to land is also ownership, but ownership of a different kind: communal; ancestral; held in trust across the dead, the living, and the unborn; and inalienable because it belongs to the lineage rather than to any person who could sell it. The 1880 definition cannot see that ownership. It recognises one form of holding land, the individual transferable estate, and renders the kabilo’s communal title invisible in law.
And the machinery of that 1880 Act takes for granted that land passes by conveyance from the state. It installed the premise at the very beginning, quietly, in an interpretation clause.
How did an English statute of 1880 come to govern land on the Gambia River? By reception. The Law of England (Application) Act provides that the common law, the doctrines of equity, and the statutes of general application in force in England on 1 November 1888 have force in The Gambia. Our own Court of Appeal has quoted that provision and applied it, holding that a statute of the 1880s bound this country because it stood in English law before that date.
The English Conveyancing and Law of Property Act 1881, which reduced land to a transferable estate in English law, is a statute of that kind. It was in force before 1888, and entered Gambian law on that basis.
Now hold the date. 1 November 1888 is the reception cut-off. 1888 is also the year Britain reconstituted the Gambia as a distinct colony with its own governor. The year the colony became a separate territory, and the year it fixed English property law as its own, are the same year. The container and its contents arrived together.
A colony that came and went
That reconstitution in 1888 is worth pausing on, because the colony’s own history undoes the claim the review rests on. Britain did not found the Gambia once and leave it to stand. It ran the territory from Sierra Leone from 1821, made the colony separate under its own governor in 1843, folded that colony back under Freetown in 1866 and abolished its councils, and separated it out once more in 1888.
Four times in 70 years the British switched the colony on and off, governing it now from Sierra Leone, now from Bathurst, as administrative convenience dictated.
Consider what that means for the claim to own land. The administrative container called ‘the Colony of the Gambia’ was provisional. Britain assembled, dissolved, and reassembled it at imperial convenience, its existence a matter of where the empire found governing cheapest.
Ancestral land, meanwhile, sat where it had always sat, held by families, through every reshuffling in Freetown and London. A jurisdiction that Britain could abolish in 1866 and revive in 1888 did not, in the intervals, cease to generate ownership and then resume. It never generated ownership at all. It administered. That is all a colonial jurisdiction did, and all it could do.
Then in 1894 came the Protectorate, and Before The State Part One traced its reach and its limits. The right to govern passed. Ownership of the soil stayed with the communities, because Britain never held it to give.
The inheritance the state received
Bring the chain to independence. On 18 February 1965, the right to govern passed, and the Gambia Independence Act carried the colonial statutes across intact, the 1880 Act among them. Before The State Part One proved what that passage could not do: it could not manufacture ownership of ancestral land the colonial administration never held. The state stepped into the administration’s shoes, and those shoes held a claim asserted and administered, never a valid ownership. It has worn the dress ever since.
This is the null premise, and it is not an opinion. It is the documented sequence of our own statute book: an estate concept installed in 1880, received in 1888, extended over a Protectorate in 1894 that took jurisdiction alone, and passed to the independent state in 1965, which never lawfully acquired the ownership it claims.
The State Lands Act 1991, which deems the indigenous holders of designated areas into ninety-nine-year lessees of the state, is the boldest assertion of the claim. It is also the emptiest, because a legislature cannot vote itself the ownership of land it never held. It can only assert. Assertion is not ownership. Nor does time cure it. Administering land you never owned, for a year or a century, is still only administering.
The title the state does hold
Meet the strongest form of the state’s case, the one the review would raise if pressed. The state need not have bought the land. On acquiring sovereignty, the common law hands the sovereign a radical title to the territory, the bare underlying title that lets it grant estates and administer. Independence passed that radical title to the Gambian state. So the state holds a title, and the objection lands: I have called empty a claim the common law supplies for free.
Grant the state that title, and watch it shrink. Radical title is not ownership. The Privy Council settled the principle for West Africa in Amodu Tijani in 1921. Even where a territory was ceded outright, the court held, the radical title passing to the Crown left the communal, ancestral ownership of the inhabitants intact, and the words of a cession reached sovereign rights alone. A community’s ownership can run so deep that it reduces the sovereign’s radical title to limited rights of administrative interference.
Now read that against the Kombo coast, where the 1991 designation bit and the Kombo Coastal Belt Lease reaches. If radical title survives even a cession and still leaves communal ownership whole, the Gambian state’s radical title over Protectorate districts that no one ever ceded leaves the kabilo’s ownership exactly where it always sat.
What the state holds is the bare title sovereignty carries. What it never acquired is the ownership beneath it. The State Lands Act does not administer the first. It seizes the second, deeming the owners into tenants of land the state holds only radically, and Amodu Tijani puts that ownership beyond the state’s reach to convert.
The home ground is firmer than the review admits. Before The State Parts One and Two proved the custody the statutes carry, and the Lands (Regions) Act goes further still, ruling the indigene’s occupation by the indigene’s own law. GTB v Jeng then found indigenous tenure indefeasible against the state’s instruments. The state answers that designation moves the land into its own hands. But designation gives only a lease, never the ownership beneath, and in Jeng the Board proved no valid designation at all.
What Gambian law has not yet said is that the state holds this land by radical title alone. That silence is no gap in my case. It is the question the review was convened to answer and assumed away.
A later imperial ruling equated protection with conquest. That equation died with the empire that made it, and I name it plainly: the reflex that called domination guardianship, the logic this series exists to expose.
The two-systems picture the review put on its slide is this same confusion in administrative dress. What Slide 12 calls two tenure systems is one communal ownership and a bare title the state holds by sovereignty and reads as a system of its own. The review hands its own framing back as the clearest proof of the premise it never tested.
The scholarship the review ignores
Here is the part that should trouble anyone who reads the review closely. None of this is hidden knowledge. The scholarship on land in Africa has established, over decades, that ‘customary tenure’ as our statutes use the term is substantially a colonial construction, that indirect rule froze living, negotiated relations to land into a codified tenure the colonial administration governed apart from the received English law, and named what it declined to protect.
So I will not use the word as my own. ‘Customary’ is the coloniser’s name for what he declined to protect, a category indirect rule built to hold indigenous land at arm’s length from the law the coloniser kept for himself. To adopt the word is to argue on the ground the dispossession prepared. I write ‘indigenous’, because this land was held by first right, long before the state that now renames it. Where ‘customary’ appears below, it stands in quotation, as the state’s term and not mine.
Mahmood Mamdani and Martin Chanock set this out decades ago. Indirect rule defined custom rather than recording it, and reshaped land tenure to suit the colonial administration. The field has long known what the review proceeds without: that communal land was never the colonial state’s to hold, and that colonial rule shaped and constrained the systems the state calls ‘customary’ to serve the administration rather than the communities.
A legal review of our land laws, conducted by scholars, should begin where the scholarship already stands. The Gambia’s does not. It proceeds as though the ownership question were settled, framing its task as the harmonisation of the statutes the scholarship exposes. It offers to modernise the machine without asking whether the machine was ever lawfully the Gambian state’s to run.
That omission is decisive. Every recommendation the review will make depends on it. Harmonise the statutes on the assumption the state owns the land, and you have built a better instrument for administering a claim that does not hold. You have improved the architecture of predation.
The deeper question, and the borrowed language
There is a question beneath the question of ownership, one the review is least equipped to ask. When the reform asks who owns the land, it takes for granted what owning land means, and that meaning comes from the 1880 statute: an estate, property one person holds and another can buy.
Within that meaning, the reform offers two answers and no third. Either the land belongs to the state, which is the claim this essay has dismantled, or to private holders as individual estates, which is the same colonial form wearing a Gambian name. Both answers accept that land is property owned in the English tradition. Neither of them can hold what the kabilo is.
Both those answers come from Europe. One holds that a person owns land as private property, earned and free to sell, and the 1880 Act built that idea into our law. The other holds that the state owns the land and lets the people use it, which is what the State Lands Act claims when it vests the land in the state and makes the people its tenants. The reform asks you to choose one of these two, both of them European, and treats that choice as the whole question.
The kabilo belongs to neither. The lineage holds its land across the generations, as an inheritance. No one person owns that land, so no one can sell it.
The land passes down the bloodline. The state never granted this land, and cannot take it back. The kabilo owns its land, fully and from the first, in a form the imported law will recognise only once that ownership is rendered into the law’s own categories. Rendered so, the law will hear the kabilo. Left in its own terms, the law turns away.
This is the epistemicide the reception installed, subtler than erasure. The law did not deny that the kabilo held land. The law required that holding to be rendered into the grammar of estates before recognising it, so the community could keep its land only by naming it in the language of its own dispossession. Recognition came on the coloniser’s terms or not at all.
The deepest injury in the review before us is that it leaves that redefinition intact. It asks us to argue for our land in the very vocabulary that took it, to prove a communal, ancestral title in the language of individual transferable estates, on forms built for a kind of ownership that was never ours. The question the land review assumed away is not only whether the state owns the land. It is why, a century and a half on, we must still call the kabilo’s relation to land a ‘title’, in the coloniser’s grammar, to be heard at all.
What the right question opens
The Coastal Belt shows what the omission costs on the ground. Before The State Parts One and Two document the Kombo Coastal Belt Lease of 1970 over a strip of Kombo coast, granted by District Authorities that held no power to alienate the land, and the certified copies that citizens recovered. Read with the null premise in hand, those leases resolve into a single act: the spending of an authority the grantors never had, dressed as a transfer of ownership.
The families and kabilolu who held that coast held it before the lease, and hold the title still.
A review that asked the right question would not start from harmonisation. It would start from the premise the record supports: that the land outside the former Colony is held by its communities, that the state is custodian and not owner, and that any state use of communal land is lawful only where it serves a genuine public purpose and the community consents.
From that premise, the reform writes itself differently. It replaces the State Lands Act rather than tidying it. Where the current law converts communal holdings into leaseholds of the state, the new law recognises ancestral title in its own right. Where the current law prices a taking as compensation, the new law returns what was never lawfully taken.
The Ministry has convened the review. The consultant is drafting. There is still time, before the roadmap hardens into a bill, to put the question on the table. So ask it plainly, in the room where the reform is being written, and answer it on the record. By what right does the state claim to own this land? Until that question is answered, every reform built on the assumption inherits the flaw in the assumption. The machinery gets better. The premise stays false.
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: Statutes are the Land (Registration of Deeds) Act (Cap. 57:01), the Lands (Regions) Act (Cap. 57:03) (regional land vested in the Authorities for the communities’ use and common benefit, Section 4, and the indigene’s occupation ruled by the indigene’s own law, Section 5), the State Lands Act 1991 (Cap. 57:02), and the Gambia Independence Act 1964, Section 1(3), read against the 2009 revised edition.
Reception rests on the Law of England (Application) Act (Cap. 5), Section 2, and Pa Njie Girigara and Another v ACE Limited, carrying the Conveyancing and Law of Property Act 1881. The Gambian footing for indigenous ownership is GTB v Jeng (HC/519/19/CL/177/C1, January 2026), finding indigenous tenure indefeasible against the state’s instruments.
Amodu Tijani v Secretary, Southern Nigeria [1921] 2 AC 399 is cited as persuasive received authority, not a Gambian holding; Sobhuza II v Miller [1926] AC 518 is the contrary imperial ruling, spent at independence. Slide 12 is from the review’s stakeholder-validation presentation, 22 July 2026.
Colonial history draws on Hughes and Perfect (2006); the account of the ‘customary’ construction on Mamdani (1996) and Chanock (1985). The custody argument and the Kombo Coastal Belt Lease are in Before The State Parts One and Two, available in the Securing Futures research archive.
About the Author: Dave Manneh is Founder and Research Lead of Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC). The full research archive is available through the Securing Futures research archive.
