The Clash of Legal Cultures: The Treatment of Indigenous Law in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa

The judiciary and legislature need to adapt African indigenous law to make it a tool of socio-economic development without sacrificing the core values of African society: the values of fellowship, of being each other’s keeper, and the notion that the free development of each is indeed a condition for the free development of all. The modern African judge will be the first to acknowledge that, in many senses, the problems faced by the British judges in colonial Africa have not vanished. Almost one hundred percent of the African judiciary is now African. But even though there is no longer the gross disparity of national origin between a judge and his community, a judge often does not come from the particular locality whose ethnic law he is administering. Apart from this ethnic question, there is an enormous educational and cultural gap between a senior judge with a Western education and the ordinary families he may deal with. Thus, the judicial system may have moved from a problem of race and ethnicity to one of class