Wherever there is a person's right, there is a corresponding duty
imposed upon that person to respect the rights of others. This
co-existence of rights and duties may be explained better by the
principle of reciprocity of rights and duties. Such is the basis of Land
as as Human Right: A History of Land Law and Practice in Tanzania. The
esteemed author documents Tanzanian land law along its line of
historical development (pre- and post-independence) whereby the thorny
issues about 'rights' and 'duties' of the landed, landless and the
intermediaries are elucidated. This volume is not limited to events in
Tanzania, but includes jurisprudence of land law of other countries in
order to tap some interpretative devices of our own by way of analogies.
Various case types- reported and unreported, local and foreign- provide
a tangible content to what would otherwise be pure theory. He also makes
references to local newspapers as a way of tapping the public responses
about land-related matters. His survey of such cases in and outside
Tanzania led automatically to judgments touching on women's right to
matrimonial property and inheritance; individual and collective rights
to land; and the right to land of the indigenous peoples. It is the
author's view that land law has remained poorly documented in Tanzania.
There is plenty of literature about Land Law, yet these sources are not
easily available or even accessible to every interested person. Equally,
some of the available literature is so old that it may not always depict
land law and/or practice as we tend to understand it today. This volume
is a comprehensive text on land law in which all the necessary land law
principles are highlighted with great precision. Advocate Rwegasira does
this with a human rights approach, believing that it is through this
approach that a person's right to land, whether individual or collective
can best be explained, especially in this era when conflict over land is
unabatedly becoming central in family, communal and societal relations.
The language of human rights is for all of us to speak. It follows,
therefore, that practitioners both of the bar and the bench will also
find it useful for quick reference, much as will do policy makers, law
reformers and the general public in and outside Tanzania.
