weekly newspaper. Tomás Vieira Mário, a well-known veteran journalist and civil society leader, likened the root causes of the brutal conflict in Cabo Delgado to fields of straw. The point was that abysmal governance had drained Mozambique’s central and northern regions dry as hay, making them prone to fires (conflict). Mário’s allegory raises these questions: How were these regions transformed into fields of straw? What are the material conditions that constitute the straw and how did they come into being? The Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (Mistra) recently published Land in South Africa: Contested Meanings and Nation Formation, about connections between land governance and economic, social and political conditions in southern Africa. In the book, 13 authors write about how various aspects of land governance transform southern Africa into dangerous fields of straw. Entitled “Land, Rights and Dignity”, my chapter documents this process in Mozambique, where the current regime of land governance encourages the scramble for resources in the name of economic development, often without due diligence on human rights, just compensation or free, informed, prior consent. This is a prolific production of fields of straw.