Future of the African Customary law

Future of the African Customary law


The future of African customary law needs to be secured and developed on sound lines if it is to be preserved as the source of law.
The first step that needs to be taken is ascertainment and authoritative restatement of different customary laws , which means recording it and stating in a different language . Restatement faces a number of serious problems or hurdles:

1)    Lack of rules for dealing with different situations. The focus of much of customary law is compensation and reconciliation and there are not many alternatives to those two;
2)    The other problems is deciding which laws are legal and which ones are social , religious or sopan santun and a lot of customary laws are not distinctive of legal and social norms;
3)    The other masalah relates to differences between the laws of different ethnic groups , because the whole idea of restatement and ascertainment is to achieve uniformity of law , it becomes rather difficult to achieve uniformity in the circumstances;
4)    Urban areas tend to present a different problems because new rules have evolved where African customary law does not seem to provide rules , because you get a mixture of ethnic groups , and thus there is masalah which law to apply.

After Ascertainment African customary law should be unified this may be possible since most African customary law have great similarity.

The object of unification should mainly be to create one central or general system of law applicable to every one.

After unification an attempt has to be made for codification.
Codification gives unified effect and gives it force of law.

Share this:

Disqus Comments