Sandra Evers – författare

This book is about the politicking and strife over land between various stakeholders on the African continent, including Madagascar. It is about attempts to control land tenure ‘from above’ and about local manoeuvring ‘from below’. The contributing authors analyse the intricate relations between the central government, the local government and grassroots level institutions.

This book examines the history and contemporary living conditions of Chagossians who were evicted from the Chagos archipelago in the Indian Ocean to make way for a strategic U.S. military base. Initially part of colonial Mauritius, Chagos was integrated into a new colony named the British Indian Ocean Territory in 1965. In 1966, Great Britain transferred control of Diego Garcia, the largest Chagos island, to the Americans under a fifty year lease. The expulsions which followed were designed to satisfy the U.S. demand for an unpopulated territory. The Chagossians were thus forced to resettle in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where livelihoods are poor and marginalized. The Chagossians are currently engaged in a campaign seeking right of return to the archipelago and recognition as a people forced to live in diaspora.

The Malagasy possess a profound religious, socio-political and economic attachment to land which connects individuals and kinship groups with the ancestors. International stakeholders value Madagascar for its biodiversity, minerals and agricultural potential, while the Malagasy state views land as the necessary platform for its economic development. This collection presents original research by established and rising scholars across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including Human Genetics, Anthropology and History. Authors focus on land as the pivotal factor underlying the economic, social and religious structures of Malagasy society and its relationship with outsiders, aiming to provide new insights into the issues underlying Madagascar’s ongoing economic and political malaise.

During the early 20th century, a group of ex-slaves established a frontier society in the no-man's-land of the extreme Southern Highlands of Madagascar.First settlers skilfully deployed a fluid set of Malagasy customs to implant a myth of themselves as tompon-tany or "e;masters of the land"e;. Eventually, they created a land monopoly to reinforce their legitimacy and to exclude later migrants. Some of them were labelled andevo ("e;slave"e; or "e;slave descent"e;). The tompon-tany prohibited the andevo from owning land, and thereby from having tombs. This book focuses on the plight of the tombless andevo, and how their ascribed impurity and association with infertility, illness, death and misfortune made them an essential part of the tompon-tany world-view.