Experiencing a different culture of land: lessons of a technologist | Malumbo Chipofya | TEDxMünster

Malumbo Chipofya is a geo-scientist from Malawi and is currently member of a research team at Muenster University. He dedicates his work to land mapping in Eastern Africa, where land registration is still a rare exception. But land mapping can lead to actual land loss, is one of his observations, if the land holders’ culture and way of life are not being taken into account. Malumbo and his team went to Kenya to observe and learn. They fused the Maasai’s traditional knowledge and their own digital tools to create more useful geographic data. In many regions of Africa, land, property lines, and tenure are still unsettled which puts especially nomadic people at risk of losing their way of life. Researching at the University of Muenster, Malawian computer scientist Malumbo Chipofya has collaborated on building software that can resolve these issues. However, when he and his colleagues traveled to Kenya to demonstrate their software, they received a surprise: people laughed. And Malumbo Chipofya learned a lot about cultural differences.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

Probably most of you rent
or own a property to live in

and that you certainly have neighbours.

Most of you know that if you entered
your neighbour's property

without permission,

they could actually get you
arrested for trespassing.

But that is enforceable here in Germany

because all properties
are registered with the state

and therefore they are protected by law.

In many countries across the world,

by contrast, up to 70% of the land
may be unregistered.

But even for people
in some of these countries,

where they have a registered land title,

such land titles may not
be relevant to how they live.

Consider, for example a Maasai family.

They have 800 cattle, 500 goats and so on,

donkeys and other animals.

They depend on the land
for all their basic needs,

for the water, for their food,
for the food for the animals,

and even for medicines.

For them, receiving
an individual land title

may actually lead to losing
access to vital resources.

An individual land title
may actually leave them worse off.

So as Cari mentioned,
I worked for a project.

It is called "its4land."

In this project

we are creating innovative tools
for land tenure registration.

Our goal is to reduce the high
percentage of unregistered land,

try to bring it to zero,

using new tools that can allow us
to rapidly map property.

The project involves eight partners,

but they are spread across six countries.

I work for the Institute
for Geoinformatics, here in Muenster.

So when we were invited to join
the project, to start the project,

I was really excited

because the target countries
are Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia,

which are all in East Africa,

and that's not so far away
from my own home country of Malawi.

We embarked on this journey,
myself as part of this team,

to create a small piece of software

that allows communities,
at a local scale, to document their land

using hand-drawn maps.

For example, this one here.

Our software should be able to read
and process the hand-drawn sketches,

understand what is drawn in them,

and then organize them,

so they can be used with
other data about land.

This was our goal

and with that in mind we set to work.

We created some preliminary designs
and built a prototype.

We even tested our workflows
on a site here in Germany.

But fast forward a few months:

We arrived in the Muslim Maasai County
of southern Kenya called Kajiado.

Almost as soon as we arrived

all of our plans which we have made,
what we have planned to the minute,

started to fall apart.

So all our assumptions
were actually basically wrong.

It happens when we arrived there,

there was a drought.

The people needed more time to go
and find water, find food for the animals.

In fact on the first day
that we were there

we actually caught up with the people
at a local water hole.

That was the only place
you can meet people at the time of day.

So we jumped straight into work,
we were standing under a tree,

researchers and the people
from the community,

and my colleague, Serene,
from the University of Leuven

started with her part of the interview.

She had prepared
an unstructured interview.

She started asking questions,

but by the time, she went from the first
to the second to the third question,

I started getting nervous.

Because I was standing next to her,

but the thing is I had a ten-page
questionnaire in my hand,

and I have prepared
everything to the minute.

I thought to myself how I am going
to perform a very structured interview

in this very dynamic scenario.

Before I finished thinking,
already it was my turn to ask questions.

She went, "It's your turn!"
I think oh my god.

Anyway, I put out my questionnaire.
Here is my first question.

I read the first question.

The interpreter standing next to me,
he translates it to the Maasai language.

Then there was a couple
of seconds silence.

Then after the silence,
everybody bursts into laughter.

Okay, what funny thing did I say?

I was taken aback for a moment
because I knew my question was plain.

There were about 15 to 20 men
standing around me,

and there were about five others
who had just walked 30 kilometres

with their animals from Tanzania,
so it is across the border,

just to graze the animals in the area.

What do I do?

I just looked back down
on my questionnaire

and I read the second question;
said forget the first.

But by the time I raised my head again

I realized that it wasn't always
the same faces around.

It was like people are standing there,
and they'd move to talk to someone else,

and then they come back

and maybe look at
the animals a little bit.

I thought this could mean a few things,

but either, this excercise is
completely boring for these guys,

or they are extremely busy.

I went with the second, of course,
because they had more immediate concerns.

We found them in their place of work,

which that was.

So I decided: screw this.

I put my questionnaire back in my pocket

and just started having
conversations with them.

So we were just standing
and having little chats.

Through that we learned quite a lot,

for example, we learned that the Maasai
never really traditionally owned land,

something we had a clue about,

but not in the modern sense
of owning land, right?

So this was always something
that is imposed on them

and it goes back to the colonial era.

Most of the things that they told us

were wrapped in little stories.

It wasn't like plain facts.
It was story after story.

For example, there was one young man
who came up to us and told us a story

that demonstrates
a certain loose relationship

of the Maasai with their land.

He had uncovered an anomaly,

he had uncovered something wrong

in the boundary of a big piece of land

that belongs to one family.

When I say family, of course, I don't mean
husband, wife, and children.

I mean like 10 or more households
of brothers, cousins, and so on,

living together on a piece of land
and sharing all their resources, right?

What had happened is

they have sort of other
neighbouring parcels of land, right?

The people in the families
in those neighbouring parcels

had actually subdivided their land

and then they had sold
parts of those pieces to other people.

In the process somehow
the boundaries have been moved,

so in favor of the new plots.

So their was a big chunk of land
that was lost to this family

that was living together.

The problem, of course, is that

the discovery that was good
that they found out

was actually 12 years too late.

Because in Kenya you can only challenge

the issuance of land titles
within a period of 12 years.

And these changes had been registered
with the state more than 20 years before.

How could this happen?

How did they not discover this?

It so happens that as they live together,
they knew about the boundaries,

but they never really considered them
as a barrier to movement,

as a restriction,
as if you can't go there.

When they graze their animals,
or when they go to collect firewood,

or do other activities on the land,
they just crisscrossed on there.

It didn't matter whose parcel
that really was.

And so sadly, of course,
when changes are happening

in that adjacent parcels,

they never really bothered to check
what is going on with the boundaries

and with the actual information
that is registered.

So anyway, we went on
with different conversations.

Later on we asked the people
to draw us some maps

to illustrate the things
that they were telling us,

the stories that they were telling us.

Here is an example:

This is a Maasai homestead.

A Maasai family lives in
a circular arrangement of huts,

which is called an enkang.

Usually in the middle
they'll have a circular region,

an enclosure or several enclosures,

where they keep their domestic
animals at night.

This is for protection from wild animals.

The traditional Maasai hut
in their language is called an inkaji,

or in plural it is called inkajijik.

It looks like this from the outside.

The huts usually belong to the wives.

So there will be one man for the enkang
and there are several wives,

and each wife will have
her own little hut for her family.

Every wife also has an entrance,

so a gate entering into the enkang.

And she is responsible for that gate.

She is responsible
for opening it in the morning

and then closing it in the night.

These gates are guarded
by a big branch of a tree,

which is called an oltim.

Once the oltim is placed
inside of this gate

then no one can enter it,
especially the men.

The men cannot walk over this oltim

because in their culture
it is considered taboo.

And there are also subtle rules about
which gates can be used for what purpose.

For example, you have a gate
which is for goats only,

and one of the other entrances
would be for people,

and maybe another one
would be for like cattle.

The point I want to make here is that

the Maasai homestead has a really
complex spacial and social structure,

and this structure
is very rich with meaning.

Unfortunately, in many modern
or current information systems

for registering land,
this rich meaning is lost.

The focus is more on parcels,

the way you do it here in Germany,

boundaries, and coordinates.

When we asked them the first time
to draw this maps for us, we asked them,

those were the stupid questions
in the first interview,

it was like could you draw
a map of your land?

And the guys were like:
What the hell are you talking about?

After we came back from the trip,

I also asked myself the same question.

What is the purpose of that drawings
that we are looking for?

Obviously, we have to change our strategy.

We spent about four month here
and then went right back.

This time we had organized
special workshops;

we actually organized things
ahead of time.

We had workshops for men,
workshops for women,

and during the discussions
people talked about

what I thought were
important things for them;

for example, how do we preserve
our water resources,

or where are the wild animals
usually found.

What are the locations
of important species of trees,

or other kinds of vegetation?

Something we learned during the time,
during the discussion, was that

the elders seem to have
a certain special skill

to read the landscape.

For example, they will look,
they observe the vegetation

and then they go like
let's drill for water here.

Of course, the younger men
don't quite understand it

I guess it only comes with experience.

But I thought that this
was a deep knowledge

and we wanted to capture that knowledge.

We wanted to get it in our maps.

So we also asked them to draw
some sketch maps for us.

For example, this is one map.

This was drawn by a group of women.

You see here some circles.

Those represent the homesteads.

You also see there are some mountains.

The map is quite detailed,
probably not very visible from here;

but where do we get the water,

where are the wild animals,

and all sorts of features;

where is the main river in our region.

And in the corners

there are little triangles which represent
the boundary of their ranch.

We are able to capture
very rich information

which you do not find in official records
together with the representation

of the official information
about the boundaries of their property.

We can put this boundaries
in relation to the features

that are important
for them in their lives.

We started off, we wanted to create
a small tool that digitizes maps,

maps of land, land parcels.

But in the process we learned

that it is not just about
a piece of ground.

It is about relationships
between people and their land,

which are often not as simple
or not compatible with the way

we look at land as the property you hold,
an individual title and it is mine.

And in the process also we learned
that for our technology to be relevant

we have to answer questions
that matter to the community

That is where we are at this journey

and its a journey really to bring
the land information and the power

of documenting land to the people.

What we have been able to do so far,

is with everything we learned,
with all the concepts we've gathered,

we have a software tool,
right now, or a prototype,

which is able to extract
meaningful digital objects

from this hand-drawn maps.

It looks like a bit of gibberish;

but those are the mountains,

the different homesteads and so on.

With this rich information
we can then integrate it

with existing maps, to create
new maps, new richer maps,

and new richer interactions
with the community generated data.

I must show this last picture

because it is sort of very special for me.

At the end of the last workshop, sort of
flipping of roles, the women called me

outside saying: "Hey, come!"
and I walked out and said: "What's up?"

So: "Stand here."`
They presented me with a gift.

It was a hand-beaded Maasai bracelet.

One of the women said: "I made this.

I thought it would be
a nice gift for you."

That was special.

For me it marked the end
of the beginning of this relationship.

which I hope it would be
a lasting relationship

with these very, very amazing people

who shared their time and knowledge
with us in Kajiado County

to which I am looking forward to go back.

Thank you.

(Applause)