This book promotes discussion and understanding of customary law and explores its continued relevance in sub-Saharan Africa. It considers the characteristics of customary law and efforts to ascertain and codify customary law, and how this body of law differs in content, form and status from legislation and common law.

The author is a Don at the School of Law, University of Nairobi Kenya and a development consultant with various NGOs and other international bodies in Eastern Africa region and Italy. He is a researcher and writer of articles and texts on matters concerning law and culture. Dr. Onyango is an expert in modern legal science with wide knowledge of law ranging from comparative legal system, international public law, ethics, philosophy, theology, sociology, mass media and social realities today. He is currently teaching Social Foundations of Law, Customary Law, International Public Law and International Relations at the University of Nairobi and he is a part-time lecturer at St. Pauls University. Among his publication are Cultural Gap and Economic Crisis in Africa and, Dholuo Grammar for Beginners.

This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations. Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule to the postcolonial state’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities. The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision making.

Africa is the emerging continent of the twenty-first century and will continue to play a major role in the world politics and trade. At the center of the African experience is customary law, which remains one of the most important and quintessential forms of legal, political, and social organization and regulation in the sub-Saharan landscape. Using qualitative and quantitative data, Casper Njuguna, sets a framework for understanding the hybrid nature of this law and creates an appropriate new moniker for it—Neo-Autogenous Sub-Saharan Law (NAS law). This systematic and empirical analysis addresses philosophical issues like human rights, property rights, women’s rights, individual rights and freedoms, family relations, social structures, and political loyalties, which span beyond Africa and African scholars.

This book challenges the central assumption of the law of territory by establishing that uti possidetis is not a general principle of law, and arguing that African customary rules were generated. It includes in-depth coverage of African secession, with issues of human rights law, self-determination and political science presented in a new light.

Martin Chanock's illuminating and definitive perspective on that development examines all areas of the law including criminal law and criminology; the Roman-Dutch law; the State's African law; and land, labour and 'rule of law' questions.