LAND REGISTRATION1
| Date | 01 April 1953 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1002/j.1099-162X.1953.tb00982.x |
| Published date | 01 April 1953 |
72 JOURNAL OF AFRICAN ADMINISTRATION
to continue to have an agricultural bias the agriculture taught must be related
closely to the agriculture practised and it will be difficult to improve on Serere as
acentre for courses for northern and eastern Uganda.
LAND REGISTRATIONl
By
A.
B. Miskin.
(First
presented
to the Philosophical Society
of
the
Sudan
at its
meeting
on 28.3.50).
" Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark."
So
runs the ancient law, and land registration is the modern way of dealing with
an old problem.
It
is the systematic recording of plots of land and of the various
rights and interests in these plots; its purpose is to guarantee boundaries, give
security of title and to facilitate dealings.
If
it is to fulfil its function, three primary
conditions must be satisfied, namely, the initial compilation must be reliable, the
register must be kept up to date and the laws of the country relating to land tenure
and registration must be appropriate and faithfully applied. Whenever aregister
has been started up without equal emphasis on each of these three purposes, or
where insufficient attention has been paid to
anyone
of the conditions, the system
has partly or wholly broken down.
The
means by which the aims of a good register are achieved can now be
examined, function by function, bearing in mind the conditions stated above.
PART
I.-GENERAL.
(1) Boundaries.
If
the register is to guarantee boundaries, they must be located on the ground at
the time of registration and must be recorded in such a way
that
they can be
redemarcated without material error, at any later date.
This
implies some sort of
sketch or map, since a verbal description relating the boundaries to natural or
artificial features is by itself seldom intelligible. Even with a sketch such a des-
cription is neither really reliable nor permanent. Streams can have their courses
changed, conspicuous trees fall or are cut down, and boundary marks themselves
can be destroyed or maliciously moved. Because a proper survey is often difficult
and expensive, especially in a relatively undeveloped country, every conceivable
expedient which will avoid an accurate survey has been tried. Eventually every
country has had to make accurate maps, usually after a prolonged period of
uncertainty, which has inflicted great hardship and injustice on the cultivators.
This
is not new: in ancient Egypt and among the Israelites there were specific laws
and penalties against moving or destroying aneighbour's land mark. These laws
would not be enacted unless they were necessary. More recently, in the pioneering
days of the United States, the maps of lands cleared by settlers were very crude,
because they were made by the settlers themselves. When these isolated maps or
sketches were fitted together at the registry there would appear to be large areas
of unclaimed land. Unscrupulous men would haunt the Land Registry and buy
these"
unclaimed"
areas. On demarcation they almost certainly would be found
to be
part
of someone's farm and the unfortunate farmer would be summarily
evicted without compensation simply because inaccurate surveys were treated as
reliable. Great hardship was caused until eventually the law was altered and even
IThis
article originally
appeared
in
the"
Sudan
Notes
and
Records."
To
the
editor
of
that
journal
and to the
author
of
the
article we are
indebted
for permission to
reprint.
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