A very successful symposium was organized by the Afrika-Institut, Leiden, in 1955 on the theme of “The future of customary law in Africa.” Unfortunately this symposium had a restricted membership and there was not sufficient time to consider all the very fundamental problems that are raised by this subject today. The British territories in Africa have also held two professional the conferences on native courts and native customary law, both under the chairmanship of Sir Kenneth Roberts-Wray, Legal Adviser to the Colonial Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office. These “Judicial Advisers' Conferences,” as they were termed, were held Kampala, Uganda, in 1955, and at Jos, Nigeria, in 1956; the reports of their proceedings have been published as supplements to the Journal of African Administration.

In the UK, research funded by the Environment Agency/English Nature has provided a series of spreadsheet-based assessment tools for calculating doses received by biota in coastal, freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems. The approach uses the reference organism concept where the organism of interest (feature species) is equated to a particular reference organism (based on its physical geometry and ecology). This paper describes the stages followed to collate additional species-, and site-, specific data and to undertake assessments to determine whether Natura 2000 sites are adequately protected from authorised releases of ionising radiation. The feature species used for the assessment were species listed under the EC Birds and Habitats Directives. The paper will describe the overall assessment process followed by the UK Environment Agency, demonstrating the staged assessment process adopted; how each feature species is mathematically aligned with the most appropriate reference organism geometry; and provide an example of the assessment conducted for the Natura 2000 sites located in the Humber Estuary, UK.

What I should like to do today is to examine the evolution of customary law in English-speaking Africa over the last three decades. I have chosen my starting date of 1950 with a clear intention in view; because the developments that we observe currently taking place often find their origins in the colonial period. They do this in two ways. First, the laws which the African countries inherited at independence had been crucially shaped by the colonial experience; and secondly, some of the projects of law reform which have either taken place or are now under discussion trace back to initiatives and discussions which occurred during the latter part of colonial rule. There is a further factor: quite apart from conscious efforts to analyse and change the laws, the laws themselves, of whatever kind, have been exposed to the forces of economic, political and social change, which are continually working away below the surface, sapping the foundations of the existing legal systems.

My own qualifications for this task I do not feel that I should dwell on. However, it is worth remarking, as symptomatic of the profound upheavals which have occurred within the period, that I was appointed to the first post in Britain of lecturer in African law in 1948. This was the period of the immediate post-war reconstruction of the British colonial empire in Africa. Things were not the same as they had been up to the Allied victory in 1945.

This essay is an attempt to investigate, assess and compare the role of the “people” as makers of law in a variety of customary societies in black Africa on the one hand, and in England on the other. The studies that may have been made of this sort of question by lawyers, constitutional experts, sociologists, political scientists and the like have rarely, if ever, contrasted the law-making function of the people in the two types of society. Where such a contrast has been made, it has tended to be limited to the proposition that things are quite different in the two types of society. It will be one of the arguments of this essay that, although the procedures and mechanisms of the law may fundamentally differ if one compares a highly developed, industrialised, literate society such as England with a simpler subsistence pre-literate society such as anciently those of the Ashanti and the Sotho, yet in each society, whatever the forms in which power is exercised or however absolute the authority possessed by those in power, yet the people participate constantly and in a variety of ways in a continuing process of law-making. It will be the task of this paper to isolate, describe and compare those ways.