The Quasi-Judicial and the Experience of the Absurd: Remaking Land Law in North-Eastern Botswana

Extract

The introduction of a quasi-judicial agency into a new nation in Africa brings with it many of the predicaments, dilemmas and contradictions that keep such agencies busy in Western countries. The power struggles, the encroachment on the rights of citizens, the problems of indeterminacy, apparent arbitrariness and uncertainty, all call to mind Western parallels, or rather, prototypes (cf. Handelman and Leyton 1978; Wraith and Hutcheson 1973; Bell 1969; Wade 1967, 1949; Allen 1956; Hewart 1929). But unlike their Western prototypes, the transplanted agencies have to displace non-Western alternatives, such as tribal courts, which reached their earlier phases of development under colonial rule. Usually, people with experience of such an alternative try to make sense of the new form of administration by reference to the old. Moreover, sometimes the displacement is partial, and old and new develop further in competition with each other. Hence the agencies transplanted in developing countries come to be politicised and problematic in ways of their own.