Part Three:

Who Signs for the Community?

By Dave Manneh, Securing Futures: Land Rights Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)

20 August 2026

The relay still signs. Part Two found it in the state’s own record: the seyfo and the alkalo administer the land the state claims ownership of, and no transfer of it goes through without their mark. The office that endorsed the Kombo Coastal Belt leases in 1970 endorses transfers today. It never stopped.

Part One asked by what right the state claims the land. This essay asks the narrower question, the one that falls on the men who mark the transfers. By what authority was their office ever built to sign?

Keep your eye on one object, because there is only one. Not the lease. Not the Act. Not the policy. The seat. The office that sits between a community and its land, and sets its mark where the community’s consent should be. Follow the seat back and it has a founder, a date, and a direction the Crown built it to face. None of the three belongs to the community.

The Seat Was Built to Face Upward

Start with the founder and the date, because the seat has both, and they are written down. In May 1895 the colonial Administrator, R. B. Llewelyn, sent London his report for 1894. It records two ordinances passed on 27 December 1894, and a Protectorate carved into seventeen districts. Each district, he writes, stood under a Head Chief, appointed by the Administrator, “from whom he takes orders and to whom he is responsible.”

Read the line for what it fixes. The Head Chief answered upward to Bathurst. He took his orders from the colonial Administrator and held his seat at the Administrator’s pleasure. Nothing in the sentence turns the other way, towards the district and its people. The British built the seat to face upward, and in 1894 the power above it was the Crown.

It had not always faced that way. Before the Protectorate the rulers answered downward. Councils of elders watched them. Power sat under a check the district could reach. The Crown kept the office and reversed the answer. The role lived through 1894. Its direction did not.

That reversal is the point. The Crown did not invent the ruler. The office it seized was old, and the men who held it were sovereigns in their own right: the Burr of the Wolof states, the Mansa of the Mandinka. What the Crown changed was the word. Europeans had once called these men kings; over the colonial years they reclassified them as chiefs, a lesser rank, one fit to take orders rather than to hold a throne.

The Crown kept that demotion and put it to work. It called the sovereign a chief and turned the office he held to face Bathurst. It lowered the man and reversed the office in one act. A sovereign became a chief, and a chief answered upward.

The founding took two things from the community, and neither was the land. Part One and the companion essay: ‘The Question the Land Review Assumed Away’ have shown the Crown took the right to rule and never the ground. What the founding took was the ruler’s standing and the office’s direction. It built the seat to face the wrong way.

Half a century on, it handed that seat the land.

The Seat Was Handed the Land

To administer a district is one power. To administer its land is another, and it came by its own statute, half a century after the Crown built the seat. The Lands (Provinces) Act, Act No. 16 of 1945, later renamed the Lands (Regions) Act, vested the land of the Provinces in the District Authorities. Section 4 declares it “held and administered for the use and common benefit… of the communities concerned.”

The Authority is the seat. The Crown laid the land in the seat it had built to face upward. The office the Crown made in 1894 to answer Bathurst was, in 1945, handed the ground itself to administer.

One word carries it: declares. The section declares a vesting. It does not acquire one. A declaration says a thing is so but it does not show how it came to be so. The Crown wrote down that the land was vested, and never wrote down where it got the land it vested, because Part One has shown there was nothing for the Crown to acquire: the ground was already owned, and had been long before the Europeans set foot and before Bathurst had a pen.

So the seat gained the land the way it had gained its direction, by the Crown’s word alone. In 1894 the word turned the office upward. In 1945 the word laid the land beneath it. Neither word acquired anything. Both declared, and no more, and handed the declaring to an office built to serve the hand that made it. The seat now stood where it stands today: above the community, holding its land, facing the wrong way.

The Seat Without a Root

One place shows the seat barest of all. In the Foni districts the Jola governed themselves without chiefs. There was no ruler over them to bend upward, no chiefly line for the Crown to keep and turn. Where the rest of the Protectorate had an office to invert, Foni had none.

The Crown made one. It installed chiefs over Jola land, drawn from Mandinka settlers, an authority with no root in the community beneath it. Elsewhere the seat could at least claim to sit on an older one. In Foni it sat on nothing the community had raised.

That is the seat with its origin laid bare. Where there was a ruler, the Crown reversed his direction and called it continuity. Where there was none, it built the office facing that way from the first. The direction is the point. The seat does not answer the community. It answers over the community’s head, and in Foni it never once answered anything below.

It Never Turned

The seat outlived the Crown. In 1965 the Gambia became an independent state, and the state inherited the office as it stood, and slid into the seat at the top of it, the seat the Crown had built to be answered from. It changed nothing about the office below. It changed only who sat above.

Nothing since has turned the office to face the other way. The Lands (Provinces) Act became the Lands (Regions) Act, the same vesting under a new name. The state rearranged the councils around the seat, and the seat held. And the officer the chief answers to has only changed its title. He was the Travelling Commissioner in 1894, the Divisional Commissioner after, and in 2006 he became the Governor, the man who runs a Region from its capital, as a Governor runs each Region from its administrative centre today.

So the chain the reader met at its birth still stands, link for link. The Minister at the top. Beneath the Minister, the Region’s Governor, appointed by the President. Beneath the Governor, the seyfo, chairing the District Authority. Beneath the seyfo, the alkalo. Each answers the man above. None answers the community below. It is the seat of 1894, its direction intact, its occupants indigenised and renamed.

And the state has just written the seat into its newest law. The National Land Policy for 2026 to 2035, approved by Cabinet, names the seyfolu and the alkalolu the custodians of customary land, with a central part in its allocation. A hundred and thirty-one years after the colonial Crown built the office to answer over the community’s head, the independent state sets it down again in a policy for the coming decade, facing the same way.

The seat has never once turned. That is the finding, and it is where this essay ends and the next begins.

The Work Still to Come

For if the seat was built to answer over the community’s head, and handed the land while facing that way, and has never once been turned, then no repair of who sits in it will do. A better-trained seyfo answers upward still. A digitised register records the same direction. The office cannot be reformed towards the community, because the Crown never built it to face the community at all. We must turn it, or unseat it.

That is the work still to come. What must stand in the seat’s place, an authority that answers the community it serves rather than the power above it, is the question this genealogy forces and does not itself resolve.

Part One asked by what right the state owns. Part Two showed the owner made a tenant. Part Three has shown the office that signs the tenancy, built by the colonial Crown to face away from the community, inherited by the state, standing unturned in the law of 2026. What must stand in its place is the work of the essays to come.

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 quotes the Lands (Regions) Act, formerly the Lands (Provinces) Act of 1945, Section 4. The seat’s founding rests on the 1894 Gambia Colonial Annual Report, Administrator Llewelyn to the Marquess of Ripon. Its place in current law is the Cabinet-approved National Land Policy 2026 to 2035. The Commissioner-to-Governor chain draws on Arnold Hughes and David Perfect, A Political History of The Gambia, 1816-1994, and the Laws of the Gambia. Foni and the colonial reshaping of the chieftaincy draw on Hassoum Ceesay, ‘Chiefs and Protectorate Administration in Colonial Gambia, 1894-1965’. The reclassification of African sovereigns as chiefs is set out in Tarikhu Farrar, ‘When African Kings Became “Chiefs”’. The null premise and the reception of English property law are argued in Before the State Parts One and Two and in the companion, The Question the Land Review Assumed Away. All are in the Securing Futures research archive.

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