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By Root 1936 0

on the average more than one such serious conflict requiring outside resolution. André and Platteau surveyed the causes of 226 such conflicts, as described either by the mediators or by the householders. According to both types of informants, land disputes lay at the root of most serious conflicts: either because the conflict was directly over land (43% of all cases); or because it was a husband/wife, family, or personal dispute often stemming ultimately from a land dispute (I’ll give examples in the next two paragraphs); or else because the dispute involved theft by very poor people, known locally as “hunger thieves,” who owned almost no land and were without off-farm income and who lived by stealing for lack of other options (7% of all disputes, and 10% of all households).

Those land disputes undermined the cohesion of Rwandan society’s traditional fabric. Traditionally, richer landowners were expected to help their poorer relatives. This system was breaking down, because even the landowners who were richer than other landowners were still too poor to be able to spare anything for poorer relatives. That loss of protection especially victimized vulnerable groups in the society: separated or divorced women, widows, orphans, and younger half-siblings. When ex-husbands ceased to provide for their separated or divorced wives, the women would formerly have returned to their natal family for support, but now their own brothers opposed their return, which would make the brothers or the brothers’ children even poorer. The women might then seek to return to their natal family only with their daughters, because Rwandan inheritance was traditionally by sons, and the woman’s brothers wouldn’t see her daughters as competing with their own children. The woman would leave her sons with their father (her divorced husband), but his relatives might then refuse land to her sons, especially if their father died or ceased protecting them. Similarly, a widow would find herself without support from either her husband’s family (her brothers-in-law) or from her own brothers, who again saw the widow’s children as competing for land with their children. Orphans were traditionally cared for by paternal grandparents; when those grandparents died, the orphans’ uncles (the brothers of their deceased father) now sought to disinherit or evict the orphans. Children of polygamous marriages, or of broken marriages in which the man subsequently remarried and had children by a new wife, found themselves disinherited or evicted by their half-brothers.

The most painful and socially disruptive land disputes were those pitting fathers against sons. Traditionally, when a father died, his land all passed to his oldest son, who was expected to manage the land for the whole family and to provide his younger brothers with enough land for their subsistence. As land became scarce, fathers gradually switched to the custom of dividing their land among all sons, in order to reduce the potential for intrafamily conflict after the father’s death. But different sons urged on their father different competing proposals for dividing the land. Younger sons became bitter if older brothers, who got married first, received a disproportionately large share—e.g., because the father had had to sell off some land by the time younger sons got married. Younger sons instead demanded strictly equal divisions; they objected to their father giving their older brother a present of land on that brother’s marriage. The youngest son, who traditionally was the one expected to care for his parents in their old age, needed or demanded an extra share of land in order to carry out that traditional responsibility. Brothers were suspicious of, and sought to evict, sisters or younger brothers who received from the father any present of land, which the brothers suspected was being given in return for that sister or younger brother agreeing to care for the father in his old age. Sons complained that their father was retaining too much land to support himself in his old age, and they demanded more land