Journal of Asian and African Studies 1–20 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0021909615612121 jas.sagepub.com J A A S Africa’s Triple Heritage, Land Commodification and Women’s Access to Land: Lessons from Cameroon, Kenya and Sierra Leone Ambe J Njoh, Erick O Ananga and Julius Y Anchang University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA Elizabeth MN Ayuk-Etang University of Buea, Cameroon Fenda A Akiwumi University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA Abstract Women have less access to land than men in Africa. Previous analyses have typically identified African indigenous culture as the problem’s exclusive source. With Cameroon, Kenya and Sierra Leone as empirical referents, an alternative explanation is advanced. Here, the problem is characterized as a product of Africa’s triple heritage, comprising three main cultures, viz., African indigenous tradition, European/Christianity and Arabia/Islam. The following is noted as a major impediment to women’s access to, and control of, land: the supplanting of previously collective land tenure systems based on family or clan membership by ‘ability-to- pay’ as the principal determinant of access to land. Keywords Africa, access to land, Cameroon, commodification, indigenous culture, Kenya, land tenure, neoliberalism, Sierra Leone Introduction Landownership statistics reveal that women own far less land than men throughout Africa. In Cameroon, for instance, women had only 19% or 17,205 of the 89,799 land titles issued to indi- viduals between 2005 and 2013 (INS, 2013: 98). This disparity is duplicated in Kenya (Harrington and Chopra, 2010; Jagero and Onego, 2011) and Sierra Leone (USAID, Online), where only a very Corresponding author: Ambe J Njoh, Professor of Environmental Science & Policy, School of Geosciences, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Avenue, NES 107, Tampa, FL 33620, USA. Email: njoh@usf.edu 612121JAS 0 0 10.1177/0021909615612121Journal of Asian and African StudiesNjoh et al. research-article 2016 Article at UNIV OF SOUTH FLORIDA on January 27, 2016 jas.sagepub.com Downloaded from