This paper is concerned mainly with the situation arising from the recognition of African customary law in the three largest of the East African territories administered under the authority of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom—viz. Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. It will not be necessary, for the present purpose, to take any account of differences in constitutional status between the territories concerned.

Eritrea is a territory of about 46,000 sq. miles on the western shore of the Red Sea. It is bounded on the south by Ethiopia, on the north and west by the Sudan, and on the south east by French Somaliland. Its one million inhabitants are divided almost equally between Coptic Christians and Moslems, with a few Europeans, mostly Italians. Eritrea was an Italian colony from 1890 to the 1947 peace treaty which ended World War II, under which Italy renounced all claim to it. The British conquered it in 1941, and administered it until 15th September, 1952, when it became federated with Ethiopia as an autonomous unit, pursuant to a resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, passed 2nd December, 1950.2 Eritrea today resembles an American state, with jurisdiction over its local laws, including customary law.

“The land is family land—he may not sell it”; “the land is our family land—it does not belong to the chiefs”. How often such statements are heard in West African courts and how difficult it is to distinguish the rights claimed by the individual, the family and the community. To resolve this difficulty is the task which Dr. G. B. A. Coker has set himself in his recently published book Family Property among the Yorubas.2 In this contribution to the rapidly growing number of books on African law the author writes of a single people—the Yoruba of Western Nigeria, and of a single topic—family property; this is no light task, for the study of the concept of family property is the study of the social and political structure of the people as expressed in their land tenure.