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.

The origin and character of Ethiopian central institutions can be understood by reference to at least four main factors: the religious history of the country; its geography; its internal wars; and the advent of Islam, which cut it off from the World outside for several centuries, and affected the course of its history.

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.

Prior to the events which began on January 15th, 1966, Nigeria was a Federal country consisting of four Regions and the Federal Territory of Lagos (a small area including the capital and adjoining areas). Each Region had its own Constitution providing for a bicameral legislature; a Westminster-type ministerial system and cabinet with collective responsibility; a Regional High Court, from which restricted appeal lay to the Supreme Court of Nigeria; a Regional public service with power of appointment and dismissal vested in an independent Public Service Commission; and over all a Governor whose functions were those of a constitutional Head and carefully spelt out in the Constitution. In addition, the North's Constitution provided for the Sharia Court of Appeal, a court of status coordinate with that of the High Court and having exclusive and final appellate jurisdiction in civil cases based on Moslem family law.

The Constitution of the Somali Republic provides that:“Administrative acts contrary to law…may be invalidated on the initiative of the interested parties in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution.”2

On Thursday, February 24th, 1966, there was a military takeover of the Government of Ghana by the Ghana Army. Before the coup, Ghana was a sovereign unitary republic under a one-party régime. The President and the National Assembly made up the Parliament of the Republic. All Cabinet and other Ministers, except the President, were members of the National Assembly. Ministers were appointed by, responsible to and dismissible by the President. The President had veto powers over any Bills passed by the National Assembly and could in any case dissolve the Assembly in the event of a disagreement with the latter. The Chief Justice and other judges were appointed and dismissible by the President. From the above it is easy to see that the President constituted and dominated the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary of the country. What we propose to do here is to spotlight such constitutional and other changes in the law of Ghana as there have been since the coup d'état.

The enactment in Malawi of the Wills and Inheritance (Kamuzu's Mbumba Protection) Ordinance, 1964, represents the most significant attempt at legal reform there in recent years. Its importance lies in the fact that it seeks to impose uniformity in an area of the law which had previously been dominated by diverse systems of customary rules. This piece of legislation is in no sense a codification or a restatement of the customary law; it strikes at the very roots of the existing customary systems. Although it is not the first attempt at reform in this area, it is novel in its ambitious aims and unequivocal implications of policy. Because of this, the degree of success which it enjoys will be closely followed by all those interested in the legal development of modern African states.

Uganda's Independence Constitution, which came into force on October 9th, 1962, was the culmination of long negotiation in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting interests of Buganda, the western kingdoms and Busoga on the one hand, and the rest of the country on the other, and the result was a delicate compromise between a unitary and a federal state—the fruit of a political understanding between the Uganda Peoples Congress and the Buganda traditionalists. As in the following years rifts first appeared and then steadily widened in the alliance between the Uganda Peoples Congress and the Kabaka Yekka—between radical and traditionalist— the survival of the Constitution in its original form appeared more and more doubtful. In fact, however, the Constitution survived for over three years with only three amending Acts, the first and most important of these making provision for the substitution of a President for a Governor-General in October, 1963.

In East Africa the traditional division of “native justice” on the one side and “English law” on the other is gradually disappearing. Within the foreseeable future it is possible to visualize a single system of law administered by one judiciary. The fusion of customary law and modified English law has been, or is being, achieved with a remarkable lack of friction. Generally speaking, however, customary law has had to make greater sacrifices in achieving the fusion than its more powerful brother, the common and statutory law of the three states. The latter has made a few minor concessions; for example, when customary criminal law disappeared in Uganda in 1964, the Penal Code was amended to admit adultery as a statutory offence. Adultery had been an offence among all the different tribes in Uganda. But it is usually customary law which has had to change to achieve a single system of law.

This paper is a sequel to one published in Anthropos (Beidelman, 1961f). It is mainly concerned with the interrelations between various tribal groups in so far as these provide insight into some of the inherent difficulties in the policy of Indirect Rule in an African political unit. By such an analysis I hope to support further a contention long made by many critics of past colonial policy, viz., that Indirect Rule was workable only through a serious discrepancy between promulgated public policy and actual political action, a discrepancy which in the long run contributed to many of the difficulties of present-day administration and the effecting of social change in contemporary Africa.