Brokers of Trust: Private Land Notaries and Rwanda’s Statist Land Governance

Across Africa, land registration initiatives have often produced contestation rather than stability. Rwanda presents a striking exception: its land governance system is widely celebrated as efficient, centralised, and increasingly digital. This article argues, however, that the durability of Rwanda’s statist regime depends less on technological platforms than on the work of private land notaries. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and fifty interviews conducted in 2024 across all five provinces, the paper shows how private notaries act as brokers of trust, translating rigid legal frameworks and fragile digital infrastructures into workable and socially credible transactions. Positioned between citizens and the state, these licensed professionals verify ownership, mediate disputes, and ritualise authority through the embodied practices of stamping, signing, and cross-checking. Far from marginal intermediaries, they are infrastructural agents who stabilise property transfers while absorbing contestation that might otherwise target the state. By foregrounding the role of notaries, the article complicates technology-centred narratives of Rwanda’s land governance success and highlights how statist authority is reproduced through a hybrid architecture of digital systems, professional intermediaries, and everyday performances of trust.