Lawyers and anthropologists who are equally concerned with scientific and pragmatic questions have called for investigation of specific instances of legal change. Such men as Garland and Roth (1967), Healey (1964), Schiller (1965), Thompson (1968), and Twining (1964) have pointed out the need for concrete facts and figures for use in evaluating particular theories of and hypotheses about the process of legal change. In The Place of Customary Law in the National Legal Systems of East Africa, Professor Twining comments that “it would be of great value to have some intensive studies in depth of the introduction of the new courts system and the unified customary law” in Tanzania (1964: 51). He adds that “it is encouraging to hear that a private research project on similar lines is under way in Sukumaland” (1964: 59, fn. 42).

In the process of nation building, the new African nations are confronted with the need to establish legal systems which would perpetuate some selected traditions while, at the same time, are appropriate enough to solve the current untraditional problems. Under colonial rule. Western legal concepts dominated some areas of life while customary laws dominated the other spheres. Criminal law, the law of torts, contracts, administrative laws, taxation, company law, road traffic and copyright laws, were dominated by Western legal concepts. Customary legal concepts were operative in the fields of land tenure, marriage, divorce, succession and guardianship. The dual legal system served respectively the colonial and the native social order. With the demise of colonial rule, African legal systems now suffer from a schizophrenic posture, torn between tradition and modernity. The schizophrenia is more painful now that the new indigenous rulers, raised in the traditional ways, use modern, often colonial government structures to govern a population still tradition-directed. In this process of governing, the dictates of a modern state often clash with tradition. One such clash occurred in April 1968, when Kenya law makers used a modern legislature to pass a Limitation of Action Act (Kenya Gazette Supplement Acts, No. 34, 1968: 310), an act which proved unpopular despite the convincing arguments in its favor. This paper explores the conflicts between modernity and tradition engendered by the passage of the Act and exemplified by the effects of the Act on the Luo social structure, especially with regard to land ownership and status relationships. The question posed is: How appropriate is law as an instrument of social change, especially in a traditional cultural milieu? Can the nation state rely on law to change its tradition-oriented rural localities? Evidence elsewhere (Massell, 1968: 179) reveals that the law as an instrument of change often yields unintended and unpleasant consequences.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of voluntary citizens' patrols (hereafter called citizens' patrols) in the urban areas of this country (Brown, 1969; Knopf, 1969; Marx and Archer, 1970 and in press). Many of these groups were shortlived responses to situations of social unrest and upheaval. They frequently were based on the premise that community residents could do more to prevent an area from burning to the ground than could the regular police, who were envisioned as an invading army. When the riot or disturbance was over, and the rationale of the citizens' patrol as an agent of social control became less obvious, such groups tended to disappear.