A founding lineage in the seat is indigenous law at work. The danger is the man in the seat disposing of land he does not own, by selling it without the owners, trading it for patronage, or turning their land into one family’s property.
Against that single act stands the ownership the Saama Kanto names. It is the kabilo’s kind, older than the freehold the British Crown brought. The lineage owns the land whole, the dead who cleared it and the unborn who will need it with the living. Each member holds a right of use inside that ownership and no title to carry out of it.
This is the communal trust earlier essays named: a duty the owners owe their dead and unborn, held by no one outside the lineage.
The blood that would seize it back
I named the danger kinship capture in What Did the Workshop Actually Validate? essay: the seat seized from within by the same blood the relay recruited.
The GIRAV Desk Review, the Ministry’s own land-law review, gives the kabilo head the power to sanction “sale or other transfer of Kabilo holdings, where transfer is permitted by custom.” In the Desk Review’s scheme, the only check on that power is custom, and the head himself is left to say what custom permits.
In the kabilo, the founding line leads and the young wait for their turn. These rankings are the kabilo’s to keep or change, and no business of a Land Board. The kabilo can argue over a ranking for a generation. A head can sign the land away in an afternoon.
Open the kabilo
Inside, the kabilo is not one man. It decides in assembly, by consensus among the lineage heads, who are usually its elders too. The head convenes. The assembly decides.
A matter between kabilolu rises to the alkalo and the council of elders. The Desk Review records a system “grounded in lineage authority, communal consensus, and restorative principles.” It lives in the boundaries the elders keep and the order of settlement the griot recites: indigenous law, spoken long before any statute was printed, and the owners’ guard stands on it.
The owners’ guard
Three guards bind what the office may do with the land, whoever holds it.
Consent
The first guard: no land moves without the assembly’s consent. The World Bank’s assessment concedes the principle: beneficial interest in the land “is vested in the family/clan and can only be transferred with the consent of the Clan head/elders.”
A head can still manufacture a consent and call it the kabilo’s. The guard rests on why the rule binds him: the land is not his. He is one member of the owning lineage with no title above the others, and he can no more sign it away than a stranger can.
The guard narrows the danger without abolishing it. It ends his licence to sign in private: the Board records only a consent the assembly gave, with the alkalo as witness. SFLRAC asked the same of the Draft National Resettlement Policy, whose donations clause lets two offices sign with no assembly behind them (see seventy-three pages, and not one word of restitution).
Composition
The alkaloship belongs to the founding lineage, or rotates among the recognised lineages, as indigenous law provides. To call that capture measures the kabilo by a yardstick it never asked for. The founding line keeps its seat and its voice, and loses the one power the colonial office lent it, to dispose of land the other lineages own.
The state has drafted a trust instead. The Legal Reform Implementation Plan would lay “express fiduciary duties” on the seyfo, the alkalo and the kabilo head, and none of those duties bars a sale by the head. Part Four of this series answered it in advance: “the state cannot hold in trust land the communities never surrendered.” The officers answer to the owners, and no duty to consult stands in for an owner’s right to refuse.
Recourse
A limit on disposal needs a place to answer when someone breaks it. The community keeps one: a dispute over family land goes first to the kabilo head, and a dispute between kabilolu to the alkalo and the elders. The Board’s record of consent is what that forum tests a dealing against, so the community can now overturn a consent the colonial seat once made unquestionable.
The Implementation Plan would codify the ladder as “Kabilo, then Alkalo and eventually Seyfo”, and write the colonial rung into law. Recourse that climbs to the seyfo re-enters the relay. He advises the Board, as Part Four set him, and judges no kabilo’s land. Indigenous recourse stops at the alkalo and the elders, and it holds only when the alkalo answers to the people who seat him.
Who sits
The word alkalo itself shows that the seat and the land have different sources. It is borrowed, though from where is disputed. David Gamble’s Mandinka dictionary marks alkaali, village head, as Arabic, perhaps from al-qāḍī, the judge, carried by Islam. Jean Boulègue, the French historian of the Wolof kingdoms, calls alcaide a Portuguese title whose function the Atlantic trade created. Either route leaves the same fact: the title came from outside the kabilo.
By the 1790s Mungo Park found “in every considerable town” of the Mandinka “a chief magistrate, called the alkaid, whose office is hereditary”. Among his tasks was “to levy duties on travellers”. Inland at Joag, the chief man “is here no longer known by the title of alkaid, but is called the dooty.” The office dealt with strangers. The land stayed with its owners.
Ownership kept Mandinka names. The bankutiyolu own the land, and the satetiyolu are the town’s founding owners. Owner and office need not coincide. In Brufut, my own community, the alkaloship lies with either the Manneh or the Sanneh, both founding clans. The land came by settlement, the seat by title.
The British Crown, and then the state, took the office over. Section 59 of the Constitution has the Minister responsible for local government appoint the alkalo, taking account of traditional lines of inheritance. The Local Government Act 2002 repeats the power (section 142) and lets the Minister remove him (section 145). Descent names the candidate. The Minister keeps the veto.
The Resettlement Policy has the alkalo oversee tenure “on behalf of the village and the District Authority.” One office serves two principals, and the one that appoints him is not the community.
The null premise refuses the warrant outright. The state has no seat to fill in Kombo Gunjur, Badibu Salikeni, Kiang Dumbuto, Fass Njaga Choi, or any community whose land it never owned, and its appointing power descends from the seat Part Three traced to the British Crown’s ordinances of 1894. The owning lineages seat the alkalo and unseat him, the hold Part Four set against the seat facing up again. Local government can work with the alkalo they seat; it has no business choosing him.
So the two questions resolve in one answer. The seat belongs to the owners, and whoever sits in it sits for them. The blood that would seize it back is the same occupant on the day he moves to sell, and the owners stop him, his own lineage among them. The man in the seat need not be good: the land beneath him is not his to give away, and that is enough.
The owners’ seat
Everything the state has drafted presumes a state that owned the land: the Minister’s warrant, the trust with its fiduciary duties, the endorsement that stands in for the lineage’s consent. The null premise removes the presumption. The kabilolu hold the seat because they owned the land before the state existed, and no paper written by a state that never owned it can say otherwise.
The Community Land Rights Act, when it comes, has only to recognise what already holds: the assembly decides, the Board records, and the community seats and unseats its officers.
The guarded seat governs the land the kabilolu still keep. The land the Crown and the state took and passed to others, under a title neither held, lies beyond its reach. One question remains, the last this series asks: how does the state give that land back to its owners?
The owners hold the seat.
Saama Kanto: the sacred responsibility that predates every statute, every gazette, and every ordinance that ever laimed authority over land our ancestors held before any of them existed. I offer this analysis in that spirit.
A Note on Sources: The closing question, the line on seizure from within and the line on trust come from Before the State, Part Four. The kabilo head’s powers and the dispute fora come from the GIRAV Desk Review Report (Atuguba, May 2026), and the findings on clan heads’ sales and on consent from the Land Governance Assessment Framework report, Improving Land Sector Governance in The Gambia (Amie Bensouda and Co, August 2013). The alkalo’s genealogy draws on Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), Jean Boulègue’s notes to Hair’s edition of Almada (1984), and David P Gamble, Intermediate Gambian Mandinka-English Dictionary (1987). The alkalo’s appointment and removal are in the Constitution of 1997 and the Local Government Act 2002. The donations clause and the alkalo’s dual mandate are from the Draft National Resettlement Policy 2027 to 2036, and the fiduciary duties and the dispute ladder from the Legal Reform Implementation Plan (Atuguba, September 2026).
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). The series interrogates the premise on which the state’s land claim rests. This essay asks who holds the turned seat, and how its owners keep it. The full research archive is available at https://securing-futures.org/research
By Dave Manneh,
Securing Futures: Land Rights
Action Collaborative (SFLRAC)
