Land as my right to shelter!

The first words that I associate with the noun-land are violence, women, HIV & AIDS, evictions, class, nationality, global capital. Yet the struggle for land rights has been at the core of global capitalism for many centuries from the days of slavery, colonialism up to the present global economic system. Rosa Luxemburg in her writings in the early 1900s, on Accumulation of Capital asserted that the process of accumulating wealth in the Global South had been accompanied by violence and the capitalists were not even satisfied with the wealth that they would have accumulated, hence the urge to get more resources. This can even be related to the 21st century global events, with relation to the Iraq crisis, Darfur, just to mention a few.
In urban Sub Saharan Africa, lack of adequate land for shelter has become one of the factors deterring growth in this region, hence the growth of urban slums. Yet, global capital is not concerned about the slums, but where it can get more quality land for its projects at the expense of local people’s habitat.
Coupled with HIV & AIDS, cases of wife inheritance and women’s loss of control of their land become the main tune of the day. Capital and patriarchy do go hand in hand.
Sub Saharan Africa has to deal with the question of land before it’s too late, and social movements have an obligation to put pressure on policy makers to restore the poor people’s dignity