Across much of West Africa land was held by a lineage, stool or community rather than an individual, with the chief as trustee and members holding secure, inheritable use rights that could not be sold away from the group. A Nigerian chief's formulation, quoted to a colonial commission and then before the Privy Council, described land as belonging to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living and countless members are still unborn. In Amodu Tijani v Secretary, Southern Nigeria (1921) the Privy Council accepted that such communal usufructuary title was a full legal interest rather than a permissive licence, and that compensation was owed for the Apapa land the colonial government had taken. Colonial and post-colonial statutes then spent a century converting, registering or overriding it, from public-land acquisition ordinances and title registration to Nigeria's Land Use Act of 1978, which vested all land in the state governors.
It is the clearest non-Western alternative to alienable freehold: land as an intergenerational trust that cannot be permanently sold, which is why much African urban growth proceeds through customary land conversion rather than formal subdivision. The tension between customary trusteeship and mortgageable title still governs how Accra, Kumasi, Lagos and Nairobi actually expand.
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