In this chapter of the book we learn about land and labor. I chose to speak about land in this blog. Land in Africa compared to the Western world was viewed in two totally different ways. You had the West using precise measuring equipment to divide up their land and they use a property system. But then you have the way the Africans divide up their land and it is based on a number of things. There is a system called, "minimal lineage", it is associated with a territory. It is based off of how many hundred of males you have derived from a single ancestor, who wives and daughters live them. The Tiv of central Nigeria do this and this process of lineage continues backwards genealogically for several generations, until all Tia are included. Then a two hundred miles in diameter is seen as a linage area. The Tia map is constantly changing unlike the Western word. It seems to me that both ways worked for both "worlds". You had the people of the West that need to make up boundaries and set up farms and start up permit city's, that they weren't going to be changing. But then you had the African that had their system that worked for them that they would be changing and moving around based off of what they needed to survive.
As you mentioned in your blog the idea or valu given for land and labor in Africa and western is not the same. In western society family or other social benefits comes after personal interest. Land for westerns is only a means of production and also family mostly doesn’t go beyond immediate family, what we call in our lesson a nuclear family. However Africans start counting from their ancestor’s. It is understood that this practice doesn’t occurred all over Africa, especially in 21 century where there is better administration system and relatively better technology. In addition to that, Since African countries have their own separate government, they like to keep their boundaries as it was before and some wants to have more land. Thus became the biggest reason for civil war in most part of the nation. As you mentioned in you blog both the African and western view worked out for both.
ReplyDelete