Though there has been intensive legislation in the countries of “black” Africa formerly ruled by France, there have been very few reforms affecting personal status. Despite the necessity for replacing traditional customs with a modern law, in view of the imperatives of social and economic development, the legislator ventures only with difficulty to overthrow the preexisting institutions in this field. Hence the importance attaching to the reforms introduced in the Ivory Coast on October 7, 1964, of which the most important is that dealing with marriage, which is the main plank in the family system. The major innovation of the new law is to put an end to the lineage structure of Ivory Coast society; henceforth the conjugal family based on marriage is the new social group recognized and protected by law.

For three years work has been in progress by a committee in Dar es Salaam on the compilation of a list of Swahili equivalents for legal expressions in order that the Swahili translation of existing statutes and the drafting in Swahili of new statutes could proceed apace. Professor A. B. Weston, Dean of the Law School in Dar, has described this project in the Journal of the Institute of Swahili Research, Vol. 35/2, September, 1965. In December, 1961, the Tanzania Minister of Education called together a committee of Swahili “experts”, which also included expatriates experienced in law and administration, and one of the central recommendations in the report of this committee was that a state language corporation should be set up, one of whose first committees should be charged with the task of compiling a Swahili vocabulary of legal words and phrases. For reasons not explained by Professor Weston, the committee's report failed to gain official sanction so the Minister of Justice at the time, the late Sh. Amri Abedi, formed his own committee in August, 1963, to compile “a law dictionary” in Swahili. Whether or not the Minister's action received official sanction is not clear, but work undertaken with the leadership of the Minister of Justice could not fail to have some value at least in defining the linguistic situation more clearly in relation to the expression of legal terms in the Swahili language.

Legislation in Lesotho concerning marriage has proceeded along unusually haphazard lines. Confusion and difficulty appear to have arisen in the territory as a result of the absence of any legislative foresight, with the result that statute law remains silent on many essential points, and there has been constant failure to consider the position as a whole.