6 - ‘A woman is like a field’: Swazi women's land dispute strategies

Summary

This chapter describes land cases involving women, in which harmony ideology was produced by male family heads and local authorities for the purpose of validating and producing consensus or compliance about male land control. I argue that male land control would be threatened if women could legally challenge male rights; therefore, women theoretically must not be permitted to dispute openly about perceived land access and use rights. The cases demonstrate that while women publicly express conformity to standards of male control, they manoeuvre behind the scenes to enhance their rights. A complex interplay between male elites' production of harmony ideologies and female disputants' strategic responses creates a ‘politics of harmony’ defined by gender.

As the following discussion indicates, Swazi women are described by the literature as occupying relatively powerless positions – in terms of land control – compared with Swazi men. Moreover, my male and female informants almost uniformly stated that, in theory, women have no right under Swazi customary land law to dispute about land. However, my case data, which I collected from two courts over the course of a year and from numerous interviews with women, indicate that female disputants enhance their disputing opportunities through application of assertion, avoidance and deception strategies. They devise their strategies based on the subject matter of the dispute, the political priorities of the male authorities overseeing their cases and their status relative to their opponents.