At the present day the African hailing from a primitive society, who comes to live in the towns side by side with Africans of other tribal origins and with Europeans, is a familiar figure. This has resulted in the influencing by alien cultures of the African's traditional way of life and the formation of a new type of society governed by a complex set of rules to which the old traditional order affords little or no guide. It is only to be expected in the circumstances that difficulty will be experienced in reconciling African customary rules of behavior with the western-type law, and that also, where the two systems are being administered side by side, the Western system of law will tend to predominate due to its greater affinity to modern development. As will be shown, this tendency to replace native custom by Western law, as exemplified by the position in the past and present territories of British Africa, even where motivated by the best intentions, is at times dominated by an adherence to Western law patterns and by Western economic and social theories, which may be neither acceptable nor expedient in the present state of African development.