They take possession of and cultivate the existing gardens as joint property. Any one of them will be allowed to clear some of their portion of bush, and fence it, and plant it as a garden, and it will then become the sole property of that one man, and if he dies it will pass as his own property to his own heirs; though, as before stated, if he abandons it, and lets it be swallowed up by the bush, it will cease to be his own garden, and will again be included in the family's joint portion of bush land, and on his death his heirs will only come into the joint bush ownership.
In this way the ownership of a garden must often be in several persons, with no well-defined rights _inter se_, and the general ownership of bush land which has never been cleared, or which, having been cleared, has been abandoned and reverted, must often be in a very large number of persons without defined rights. In fact, so far as bush land is concerned, one only has to remember that on the death of an owner it passes into joint ownership of children--that on the deaths of these children fresh groups of persons come into the joint ownership--that this may go on indefinitely, generation after generation--that bush, having once got into the ownership of many people, is hardly likely to again fall by descents into a single ownership--that indeed the tendency must be for the number of owners of any one portion of bush steadily to increase--and finally that there is no way by which the extensively divided ownership can be terminated by either partition or alienation--and one then realises the extraordinary complications of family ownership of bush land which must commonly exist.
As regards both movable effects and gardens and bush land there must be endless occasions for dispute. How are the movable things to be divided among the inheritors, and, in particular, who is to take perhaps one valuable article, which may be worth all the rest put together? How are questions of doubtful claims to heirship to bush and garden land to be determined? How is the joint ownership of the gardens to be dealt with, and how is the work there to be apportioned, and the products of the gardens divided? How are the mutual rights of the bush land to be regulated, and especially what is to happen if each of two or more joint owners desires to clear and allocate to himself as a garden, a specially eligible piece of bush? Such situations in England would bristle with lawsuits, and I tried to find out how these questions were actually dealt with by the Mafulu; but there is no judicial system there, and the only answer I could get was that in these matters, as in the case of inter-community bush boundaries and personal bush boundaries, disputes were practically unknown; though it was pointed out to me, as regards bush land, that the amount of it belonging to any one family was usually so large that crowding out could hardly arise.