There are two aspects to this subject. On the one hand, one may investigate the background of the students for whom this teaching is intended. Some persons think that one must be concerned with courses aimed principally at Africans who are unable to attend university in their countries of origin; others think that such courses should be open to all who are interested in comparative law and should place African legal systems on the same level as those of the common law countries or Soviet law.

On the other hand, experts in this field are divided on the question of the place which African law should occupy in the general structure of university curricula; in some people's view it is useful to distinguish the traditional law from the modern law, associating the former with the social sciences and the latter with law proper. Other specialists think that it is not possible to teach African law without first giving the student a solid grounding in the sociology, politics, and economics of the African continent.

The courts in Ghana and Nigeria apply indigenous customary law in a large proportion of cases, particularly those involving family relationships or land. During the past century the courts have done much to clarify this law and adapt it to rapidly changing social conditions. One such adaptation is the subject of this article. The English doctrine of acquiescence has been imported to fill what appeared in new circumstances to be a deficiency in the customary land law. The doctrine had been used to perform functions different from those which it has performed and is performing in English land law. This article seeks to compare the different characteristics the doctrine has assumed in the three countries, and to draw some conclusions from the experience of Ghana and Nigeria.

A realistic assessment of the part customary law can be expected to play in the developing legal system of an African state must depend upon the availability of detailed information as to the way in which this body of law is now responding to the problems associated with changing social and economic conditions. Information of this kind can only be obtained through the study of actual disputes and the procedures followed in their settlement. Curiously, lawyers interested in customary law have on the whole neglected such an approach, concentrating their energies upon the discovery and systematic organisation of abstract rules purporting to constitute the legal norms of the society under investigation. Moreover, the method of research followed in most instances has been to question groups of informants assumed, to be knowledgeable about customary law, rather than to search for norms directly in the raw materials provided by the law in action, and this approach has inevitably insulated the investigator still further from actual disputes and the agencies involved in their settlement. Had the only means of finding out how disputes were actually settled been to sit and watch them in progress, lawyers might have been excused for leaving that to the anthropologists. But such information is widely available through other means: informants can be persuaded to reconstruct actual disputes from memory instead of racking their brains for abstract rules, and accounts of such disputes canbe found in the written records kept by many customary courts. This latter source, particularly, seems to merit more serious attention than lawyers have been prepared to give it in the past, and it is with it that this article is concerned. Drawing upon customary court records, it is hoped to illustrate both what this source consists of and the manner in which the customary family law of a single Tswana tribe is developing.

For sociologists and lawyers Somalia presents a fascinating observation ground.

Most of this long and narrow strip of land straddling the Horn of Africa is a dry savannah punctuated by graceful acacias spreading out their thorny leaves like giant umbrellas. Most of the inhabitants are nomadic herdsmen whose principal measure of wealth is the camel and whose main occupation and preoccupation is combating the ever-recurrent droughts by periodic treks in search of water and grazing.

Traditional African laws have up till now been little studied, because they are unwritten, adversely affected by the colonial experience, and seen through western categories. Before looking at African land law, one must sketch the main characteristics of African customary law generally—that it was oral; popular; intimately linked with the invisible world; based on the legal and social complementarity of individual and group; that it implied the interdependence of persons and things, and the reciprocity of rights and duties. Colonial contact emphasized the individual aspect at the expense of the community, thus provoking a reaction against individualism from many of the independent African states.

Customary land law in Africa operated against a supernatural background, and linked land and family. The first essential feature was that of lineage or family title to land; restriction of land rights within the lineage—“exo-intransmissibilité”, inalienability outside the family—corresponds to exogamy in the realm of marriage. The benefit of land confined within the lineage was periodically redistributed among its members through the law of succession, which was more precise in some societies than in others. The second main feature of customary land law was the role of the “land chief”, distinguishable from the political chief, who represented the first occupant of the land, and mediated between the occupiers and the spirit world through his control of land use. Colonial administrations largely neglected this functionary.