Article Index
3. Land Tenure Systems
Although the under the law all land belongs to the state, urban land can be owned privately.
Under Article 2 private land is divided into two categories namely urban land designated as such by the legislation in force and rural land which is other land.
Nomadic pastoralists control their traditional pasture areas through customary rights.
Indigenous tenure systems in Djibouti involve the rights to pasture land and water points. The Afar and the Issa maintain similar customary tenure practices, both investing regional tenure control in tribal groups. Local tribal units are subdivisions of the sultanates that have historically spanned Djibouti’s borders with Ethiopia and Somalia. A portion of the land traditionally used for transhumant herding is assigned to each family within a tribe. This land remains within a family, and the use rights are inherited by sons of successive generations. If a family has no male heir, the tribal chief may choose to reallocate the land to other families. Among the Afar, tribes are divided into noble and vassal groups. Noble tribes will cede to related vassal tribes the use rights of pasture and water points in exchange for their support and services in the event of warfare.
Unrelated vassal tribes must borrow pasture land in exchange for a tribute payment.
The tribes of the Issa are less hierarchical than the Afar, and a larger portion of traditional Issa territory lies outside of Djibouti’s contemporary borders. The head of an Issa family unit will decide when and where next to move the herds, taking into account the current state of familial and/or friendly relations with other Issa families whose lands he might traverse.
Since the Djibouti government consists of both Afar and Issa people, and since there are few crops to be threatened by the pastoralists’ herds, there is no national tenure legislation that favors agriculturalists’ rights over pastoralists’ rights. Unlike most African countries where pastoralists are disadvantaged by tenure codes that do not recognize grazing as a productive use of the land, Djibouti upholds (or, with an absence of other legislation, it at least does not contradict) the traditional tenure rights and management practices of pastoralists.
There is little pressure or concern to codify pastoralist grazing rights, or to title their tribal and family-based landholdings, because the customary mechanisms of conflict resolution regarding pasture lands and water points continue to function. Furthermore, due to the droughts of the 1980s and the draw of urban-based amenities and services, there is an increasing trend towards sedentarization.
Gender issues are acute even by regional standards. The country’s clerics follow a local interpretation of Islamic tradition that differs from Islamic inheritance practices elsewhere in the Muslim world, women do not inherit land or land access. Men own the animal herds as well as the land. Women may possess only few animals from her dowry.