Customary Land Tenure, Inheritance Rules, and Smallholder Farmers in Malawi

This article examines the interrelationship between smallholder strategies to obtain land and customary land tenure and inheritance rules in contemporary Malawi. Based on village surveys in diverse regions of Malawi, it highlights how most land transactions followed customary rules but also explores significant deviations. The reasons for transfers deviating from customary norms included unique personal relationships between landholders and heirs, wives returning to patrilineal villages, and intensifying land scarcity. Yet the effects of land scarcity were contradictory, as it not only induced individuals to obtain land by any means possible, but also encouraged the obstruction of flexible land transfers to prevent lineage land from being alienated to non-kin, suggesting a conflict between individual and lineage strategies. The article also examines vernacular land markets, which are limited in scale and provide different opportunities for poor and wealthy farmers. By highlighting both the adaptive and negotiable nature of customary land systems and a trend towards enhanced inequality, this study seeks to capture the complex reality of Malawian agrarian dynamics.