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Introduction: Some notes on “African Customary Law”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Simon Roberts
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Extract

The papers collected here can safely be left to speak for themselves. Ranging from Abel's map of some ideal types, conceived at a level of abstraction comparable to Weber's typology of authority, to Sachs' account of a day's work in a Mozambique popular tribunal, they represent very fairly the diverse perspectives from which “customary law” is presently being written about. They show that we are dealing here with a number of different phenomena, and that people have seen these phenomena in sometimes radically opposed ways.

The very label “African Customary Law” has a flavour of the 1950s and 60s about it, recalling that new and exciting area of study which Allott marked out single handed and then enthusiastically encouraged others to join him in developing. The assumption was then that we were dealing with a living, specifically African repertoire of norms and procedures which could be put to work in helping to shape some African “future”. Since then the nature and provenance of this repertoire and the merits of that ambition have been the subject of a lively re-examination; and that discussion was at the heart of the Lisbon conference where these papers originated.

The profitable continuation of that discussion requires that we are clear about the range of meanings which “African customary law” may carry. My own, subjective, marking-out of the field would be along the following lines.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of African Law , Volume 28 , Issue 1-2: The Construction and Transformation of African Customary Law , Spring 1984 , pp. 1 - 5
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1984

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References

1 Chanock, Martin, Law, Custom and Social Order, (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar.

2 Hobsbawm, E. J. and Ranger, T. O. (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)Google Scholar.

3 “How State Courts Create Customary Law in Ghana and Nigeria”, in Finkler, Harold W. (compiler), Papers of the Symposia on Folk Law and Legal Pluralism, XIth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Vancouver, Canada, August 19–23, 1983. Ottawa, 1983, 297–332Google Scholar.

4 See title cited in footnote 2 above.

5 E.g. the account by Foucault, M. in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, 1979)Google Scholar.

6 See, specially Giddens, A., The Constitution of Society (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

7 For a discussion of this process, see, e.g. de Sousa Santos, B. ‘Law and Community: the Changing Nature of State Power in Late Capitalism’, in Abel, R. L. (ed.) The Politics of Informal Justice, Vol. 1 (London and New York, 1982), pp. 249–266Google Scholar.

8 Althusser, L., ‘Ideology and the ideological state apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London, 1977)Google Scholar.

9 See title cited in footnote 7 above.

10 See the example provided by Sutherland, A. in “Local Level Dispute Processes in Botswana: The Yeyi Moot Encapsulated’, in (1981) J.A.L. 94–114Google Scholar.

11 See, e.g. Merquior, J. G., The Veil and the Mask (London, 1978), p. 29 and essays in title cited in footnote 2 aboveGoogle Scholar.