Abstract:

This paper challenges the common assertion that 40 per cent of the land in Papua New Guinea’s National Capital District (NCD) is customary land and finds that more than 25 per cent of what was still customary land at the turn of the millennium has since been alienated. An estimate is made of the number of indigenous (Motu-Koita) people who reside in one or other of the NCD’s ‘urban villages’ and the proportion of these people who might still qualify as customary landowners. A review of the social consequences of colonial land acquisitions is followed by an examination of both legal and informal avenues through which customary land has been alienated over the past 25 years. Attention is also paid to the history of relationships between the customary landowners and the rapidly increasing number of people who have been evicted from informal settlements on ‘vacant’ state land since 2012. The paper concludes with an assessment of the extent to which customary landowners have been willing participants in the alienation of their own land, the extent to which they have attempted to resist this process, and the probability that they will sooner or later be left with no customary land except the land on which their urban villages are currently located.