Land reforms, with the majority bordering on full scale revision of tenure rules
have become a recurrent theme in the agenda of most African states since attaining
political independence. For southern Africa, and a number of former colonies where the
white settler populations acting in concert with the colonial administrations dispossessed
the majority of the native populations of their land, the reforms have taken the form of
restitution and redistribution of land. Unlike these types of reforms in southern African
and because the Bechuanaland Protectorate was not a settler colony, Botswana has
framed its land tenure and land use reforms with an eye on the problems associated with
common property management.
My dissertation evaluates the effects of Botswana’s land reforms on social
transformations in Kweneng District by carefully investigating their impacts on
households’ livelihood strategies, kinship ties, and social balance of power on one hand,
and the implications of these transformations for urbanization on the other.
While acknowledging the good intentions of the government as encapsulated in
the objectives of the reform policies, it is my contention that several areas which were
never taken into account during the formulation of these policies have been adversely
impacted. Unfortunately, the unintended consequences have overshadowed the targeted
ends of the reforms. These results are visible in the contemporary family and kinship
structure, the chieftaincy institution, livelihood systems in livestock and arable
agriculture, administration of justice, and the phenomenon of urbanization.