This book examines the trend in Africa today to replace communal forms of customary tenure with Western-type private land tenure arrangements. These are markets in land that treat it as a commodity like any other, and forms of rural credit involving land as collateral. The author develops an aetiology of the main actors in this historic process which is already having huge human consequences. It is likely, if more widely implemented, to transform the face of African rural society towards landlessness, forced migration to big city slums, and rising inequality.