Part One
What If the State Never Owned the Land?
By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)
May 2026
I hold the certified copies. They are dated 1970. The District Authorities of Kombo North and Kombo South granted a ninety-nine year lease over the coastal belt to the Minister of Lands. Those authorities signed. The communities whose land the documents dispose of did not.
By what right does the Gambian state claim to own the land of the former Protectorate?
The trilogy that came before this series traced how communities lose their land to intermediaries and to the instruments of law. It stopped short of the premise beneath all of them. I name that premise here and call it the null premise. The land of the former Protectorate, which is to say everywhere beyond the old Colony, was never the state’s to own. The state asserted title. It never held it. The statutes that look like ownership describe custody, and custody sits a long way from owning.
Two Instruments, Two Legal Realities
The territory now called The Gambia entered British control through two different legal instruments, and the governance that followed independence has confused them ever since. That confusion sits at the root of the state’s land claim.
Europe drew the outer line. The Anglo-French Convention of 1889 fixed the borders of the Gambia, demarcated between 1891 and 1905, a thin strip along the river, splitting one Senegambian world between two colonial powers. Both the Colony and the Protectorate sit inside that line.
The Colony was small and exact: Bathurst, now Banjul, with the adjacent Kombo Saint Mary area and the Ceded Mile; McCarthy Island, now Janjangbureh, taken in 1823; and Albreda, ceded by France in 1857. Those transactions form a chain of agreements through which jurisdiction over named places passed to the Crown. The Colony has a legal history, whatever one makes of its morality, and the British treated it as their freehold estate.
The Protectorate rests on other ground. British administrators created the Gambia Protectorate in 1894 and built it on agreements they called treaties of protection with the rulers of the interior. Protection. The rulers accepted a political arrangement with an outside power: military alliance and administrative oversight.
The land stayed what it had always been, the inheritance of the communities who had held it for centuries. A protectorate carried authority over people. It carried no transfer of the ground beneath them.
What the Flag Could Not Transfer
On 18 February 1965, The Gambia became a self-ruling state. The right to govern passed: the authority to administer the territory and to live under a constitution the people chose. Britain could not hand over what it had never held, the title to the ancestral land of the Protectorate’s communities. When the British flag came down and the Gambian flag rose, Kombo and every district of the former Protectorate kept what they had always held. The flag changed. The land did not.
Custody Is Not Ownership
Here the state’s own law turns against its claim. The Lands (Regions) Act, which still governs land outside the designated areas, vests that land in the District Authorities to be held, in the Act’s own words, for the use and common benefit of the communities concerned.
Hold those words. Use and common benefit of the communities. A holding for someone else’s benefit is custody. The custodian guards the land and answers for it. He does not own it, and he cannot give away what belongs to the people he holds it for.
The state behaves as though custody were ownership. It runs a private land market it regulates rather than supplies, and its courts fill with disputes between private holders of land it claims to own. It drafts a Real Estate Agents Bill to govern a market it would have no reason to govern if it were the only seller.
I set that evidence out in full in the companion essay, What Did the Workshop Actually Validate?, in the SFLRAC archive. The conduct of an owner and the conduct of a custodian differ, and the state’s conduct is the custodian’s.
How the statutes accomplish this, through the designated areas and the deeming of customary holders into lessees, is the work of Part Two. Part One stays with the premise and its proof.
What the Documents Show
I hold the certified copies.
The 1970 papers record a transaction. The District Authorities of Kombo North and Kombo South granted a ninety-nine year lease over the coastal belt to the Minister responsible for Lands and Provinces, Yaya Ceesay. Lease No. P.14/1970 covered Kombo South, Lease No. P.18/1970 covered Kombo North. My ancestral land lies within their reach. Citizens recovered these copies, long withheld behind official claims of loss, as my earlier articles document.
The copies record a term the affected communities do not recognise. Brufut elders recall a fifty-year arrangement. The Gambia Tourism Board described a fifty-one year lease. The copies show ninety-nine years, running from 1969 to 2068. A community recalls one term, the state’s own agency stated another, and the paper records a third. That is the divergence you would expect when a relay signs for a community that was never in the room.
The District Authorities held the coast in custody for the communities. The Act gave them a narrow power to grant leases, and a lease conveys the use of land for a term. It does not move the land itself. So even read at its strongest, the 1970 transaction handed the Minister the use of the coast for ninety-nine years. The ground beneath the lease stayed with the communities, held for their use and common benefit, as the Act says throughout.
The state’s machinery concedes the point and then overreaches. Not until 1994, under the State Lands Act of 1991, did the state designate this coast as State Land. That admits it was not State Land in 1970, when the District Authorities signed.
The designation changed the label, and the right stayed with the kabilos. By the Act’s own words, the state holds even designated land for the communities’ use and common benefit, as trustee, never owner. No legislative act converts into ownership what the kabilos never surrendered.
And the communities were absent. The official land governance record itself, the assessment carried out under the World Bank’s land governance framework, lists the 1970 coastal belt lease as a ninety-nine year lease over what the record classes as customary land, endorsed by the alkalo and the chief.
Read that entry slowly. The record calls it customary land. The communities held it by indigenous right. The consent came from the alkalo and the chief, which is to say the relay, the colonial intermediaries who answered upward to the state. A custodian spent an authority he never held, with the blessing of men the communities never chose to bind them. That is the architecture of predation working at the moment of signature. How that relay came to stand between the citizen and the land, and what must replace it, is the subject of Part Three.
The Land That Predates the State
I am a Brufutnka. My family’s land lies in those lease documents. My ancestors cultivated it, settled it, and named every path and boundary within it across generations whose memory runs deeper than any colonial archive. When I hold the certified copies of the 1970 leases, I hold a paper that asserts authority over land my people have held since before The Gambia was a state, before it was a protectorate, before any administrator reached this coast with a pen and a mandate.
So return to the words the state leans on. Vesting. Trust. Each belongs to a foreign grammar of property, laid over a people who never held their land as an estate to be vested in anyone. The communities held it as inheritance, as the belonging the Saama Kanto names, older than the vocabulary of estates.
To argue only that the state keeps a poor trust would grant that the land was ever a trust to keep. It was not. A custodial fiction cannot launder an original dispossession. The wrong runs deeper than a broken trust. It reaches the moment the apparatus claimed the right to turn ancestral land into property at all.
This series opens with the prior question and answers it here. The state’s claim rests on a colonial fiction, dressed in later legislation and held up by a public belief the statutes themselves contradict. The parts that follow read those statutes closely and trace the relay that still stands between the citizen and the land. The flag changed in 1965. The land waits for the law to catch up.
Saama Kanto: the sacred responsibility that predates every statute, every gazette, and every ordinance that ever claimed authority over land our ancestors held before any of them existed. I offer this analysis in that spirit.
A Note on Sources: This essay rests on certified copies of the 1970 coastal belt leases, first reported in my Rejoinder: A Victory for Transparency and a Call for Justice, with statutory and historical detail drawn from establishment sources: Ceesay, the LGAF report, and Bensouda, cited for their facts and read against their reformist purpose. The full record sits in the SFLRAC archive at https://securing-futures.org/research/publications.
About this Series: Before the State is a series of essays by Dave Manneh, Founder and Research Lead of Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC). Where the preceding trilogy, The Architecture of Predation in The Gambia (SFLRAC, 2026), documented how predatory land governance operates and how communities resist it, this series interrogates the premise on which that architecture rests: the state’s claim to own the land. The full research archive is available at https://securing-futures.org/research/publications.