“Of all the exploits of equity, the largest and the most important is the invention and development of the trust.”

These were the words of Maitland.2 In the course of his lecture, the learned professor ascribed the invention of the Law of trusts to the work of English lawyers. Before going any further, it should be pointed out that the institution of trusts is one which is not peculiar to English law.

Most territories in Africa south of the Sahara have produced some printed works in a vernacular language for the guidance of African courts. In the Kingdom of Buganda, however, during the last five years the whole corpus of statutory law and case law administered by the Kabaka's courts has been published in several bilingual series which may be of interest to those engaged in the development of judicial systems elsewhere in Africa.2 Spurred on by the comment of a recent reviewer,3 I propose now to describe these publications and the evolution of a technical legal vocabulary in Luganda, the language of the Ganda.

It is natural that customary law, as compared to written laws, varies like language from tribe to tribe and that in larger or scattered tribes there are different practices within a tribe itself. Customary legal systems have not been recorded in full. For example, the Turkana who are purely pastoral have no formal land law because grazing and rights to water are common to all members of the tribe. The Ndorobo had transitional rights of hunting and honey-gathering in certain ridges, but have refused to extend such exclusive rights to the cattle of the right-holders, while the Bantu generally have highly developed systems of land tenure in their agricultural areas.