Keep & Lease ...hell even my prior notion of cheap/free don't give a reasonable picture of how land stewardship worked in most African societies.
Land isn't "owned" by any one person. It is presided over by the locals and allocated for various uses by them. This is why it seems like land is "free" when actually it is the duty of the local rulers to allocate land. If someone says hey I want to put up a farm, restaurant, school, hotel, house, etc and they think the enterprise is useful then the land is allocated.
Exclusive access to land, in order to mine for minerals or something would likely cost you. But
similar to fishing(noone owns the lake just what you pull out the lake) if you ask to mine nonexclusively it likely wouldn't cost much. The above is before accounting for government regulations/permits, greedy "traditional rulers", ...or normal worker costs paid to locals during construction
(land might be "free" but you still gotta pay for construction)
Those Land Tenor practices came forward to current times.
Below deals with Congo and it worked similar in other places as well...