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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Neo-traditionalism and the customary law in Malawi |
| Author: | Chanock, Martin |
| Year: | 1978 |
| Periodical: | African Law Studies |
| Issue: | 16 |
| Pages: | 80-91 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Malawi |
| Subjects: | legislation customary law |
| External link: | https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/jlpul16&id=86&collection=journals&index=journals/jlpul |
| Abstract: | Malawi is used here as an example to illustrate the argument that the failure to study historically the changes in African Law in the colonial period has led to a confusion of tenses which affects our understanding of African law. As a legacy of the colonial period those states which had been under British rule had a so-called dual legal system: part British, part African. Africanist lawyers have since, quite properly, been building upon, 'restating', and reasserting this African element. Yet they know very little about how it came to be what it is; and there is a tendency to treat it as a kind of timelessly valid African 'survival'. But the African law of modern Africa was born in and shaped by the colonial period. In the areas of criminal and family law, African law represents the reaction of older men to loss or loosening of control, specially in the first thirty or forty years of the colonial period. Then, in accordance with the policy of indirect rule, a large portion of the administration of justice was turned over to those people who had reason to define, and to administer, the law in a restrictive and authoritarian way. This forms the basis of current African law. Ref., French sum. p. 131. |