This inclusive dynamic is further deepened by the translocal character of inheritance, where
Malawian migrants mobilize kinship, memory, and ritual to assert claims across time and
space. Inheritance in Lydiate is not merely about transferring land; it is a political and
symbolic act of translocal belonging, sustained through burial rights, ancestral naming,
remittances, and spiritual ties. Migrants inherit and allocate land based on affective histories,
familial care roles, and intergenerational responsibilities; strategies that remain invisible to
the state yet deeply intelligible within community logics [28].
These diasporic land claims often bypass legal titles, instead anchoring legitimacy through
ritual, memory, and witness-based social contracts. Migrants who are away influence land
allocation through delegated authority, financial support, and long-distance decision-making.
This disrupts state-centric notions of property that require physical presence, written
documentation, or national identity. Instead, legitimacy is assembled through relational
infrastructures and symbolic acts of care, continuity, and shared obligation.
Together, these gendered, generational, and translocal practices craft a vernacular regime of
land governance that challenges conventional legal frameworks. In the absence of formal
recognition, migrants construct socially embedded, spiritually sanctioned, and relationally
coherent systems of inheritance that function as both practical tools for land access and
symbolic assertions of belonging and citizenship from below. These practices reveal a deeper
politics of place-making that is negotiated in kinship terms but resonates powerfully with
broader struggles for equity, recognition, and continuity in postcolonial urban margins.
5.5 Agile inheritance as vernacular governance:
Theoretical and policy insights
This study introduces agile inheritance as a theoretical lens to understand land succession in
informal, migrant-dominated peri-urban spaces. Departing from static legal or customary
frameworks, agile inheritance captures the relational, improvisational, and negotiated modes
through which land is accessed and legitimized in conditions of institutional precarity. Rather
than relying on juridical norms, inheritance in Lydiate is enacted through everyday acts of
vernacular governance: family meetings, witness testimonies, and symbolic gestures, that
reflect both social recognition and community-derived legitimacy.
This conceptual framing challenges binaries such as legal/informal or patriarchal/matrilineal
by highlighting how migrants create locally intelligible systems of legitimacy, aligning with
Meagher’s [34] notion of hybrid political orders and Cleaver’s (2012) institutional bricolage.
Migrants reassemble kinship norms, caregiving obligations, and ritual authority to claim and
transfer land, performing insurgent acts of citizenship [23] even in the absence of state
recognition. In this sense, agile inheritance emerges not merely as flexibility in succession
but as a political practice of place-making, intergenerational justice, and tenure stabilization
at the urban margins [47].
These insights carry urgent implications for policy and planning. Rather than viewing such
inheritance as aberrant, urban planners should recognize agile inheritance as a community-
anchored governance system that fills institutional voids in land regulation. By incrementally
integrating socially validated inheritance claims into community land registers, endorsed by
witnesses or local leaders, states can bridge the gap between informal legitimacy and formal
recognition, without erasing cultural practice or enabling elite capture.
Moreover, urban planning must become more responsive to fluid land reallocations within
households, which reflect evolving family needs rather than unauthorized encroachments.
Recognizing these adaptive practices would align with SDG 11 (inclusive urbanization), SDG
10 (reduced inequalities), and SDG 16 (institutional legitimacy and justice). Ultimately, agile
inheritance is not a deviation from governance—it is governance. Its recognition offers a vital
entry point for designing inclusive, participatory, and just urban futures amid growing
informality, migration, and spatial inequality in African cities.
6 Conclusion: Agile inheritance and the
politics of land legitimacy
This study examined how Malawian migrants in the rough peri-urban settlement of Lydiate,
Zimbabwe, navigate land inheritance amid structural exclusion from both statutory and
customary land regimes. In this context, inheritance is neither a vestige of tradition nor a
strictly familial transaction. Instead, it emerges as an adaptive strategy for securing land,
asserting belonging, and sustaining intergenerational continuity in the face of legal
invisibility and socio-political marginality. The study brings to light agile inheritance as a
conceptual framework that captures the fluid, relational, and socially legitimized ways in
which land is transferred and governed outside formal tenure systems.
Empirically, the study identifies three core dynamics of this agility: the plurality of
inheritance sources (beyond parent-to-son transfers), the strategic timing of inheritance
(during illness or life rather than post-mortem), and the vernacular mechanisms of
legitimization (community witnesses, elders, and moral consensus). These processes
underscore how land inheritance is not governed by the state but enacted through vernacular
governance, rooted in social trust, symbolic authority, and moral accountability. Inheritance
becomes a de facto mode of regulating space and transmitting rights where the state has
retreated or selectively intervened.
