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Things Fall Together: The Past and Future Africas of T. O. Elias's Africa and the Development of International Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2008

CARL LANDAUER
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Abstract

This article investigates T. O. Elias's constructions of past and future Africas in Africa and the Development of International Law. It locates Elias within Nigeria's educated elite and its oscillating constructions of past and future Africas, and turns specifically to Elias's romanticized African past of the great medieval empires as a source of legitimacy within the broader ‘development’ of international law. The article works through his depiction of ‘customary’ law in Nigeria and how the African past maintains its presence in current law, and then addresses Elias's depiction of the future represented by new pan-African institutions. Finally, the article discusses Elias's depiction of a liberating future or ‘modern’ international law – the move from consent to consensus – in which Africa seems important only within the broader population of new states, and how his conception of international law – citing Jenks and Jessup, Friedmann and Falk – with its commitment to law's reflection of society, fits comfortably within the traditions of a modern sociological jurisprudence.

Keywords

African international lawcentre–peripheryTaslim Olawale Eliasinternational legal theoryOrganization of African Unity
Type
ARTICLES
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , June 2008 , pp. 351 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2008

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References

1. T. O. Elias, Groundwork of Nigerian Law (1954).

2. Ibid., at 6.

3. Ibid., at 365.

4. Ibid., at 364.

5. Ibid.

6. T. O. Elias, Africa and the Development of International Law (1972).

7. P. S. Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (2000).

8. Appiah identifies the immense significance of the series: ‘The weapon of pedagogy changes hands simply because we turn from reading Buchan and Conrad and Graham Greene to reading Abrahams, Achebe, Armah – to begin an alphabet of writers in the Heinemann African Writer's series, which constitutes in the most concrete sense the pedagogical canon of anglophone African writing’. K. A. Appiah, In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1993), 55. Similarly, Achebe himself writes in Home and Exile, ‘The launching of Heinemann's African Writers Series was like the umpire's signal for which African writers had been waiting on the starting line’. C. Achebe, Home and Exile (2001), 51.

9. C. Ekwensi, People of the City (1966 [1954]), 79.

10. W. Soyinka, The Interpreters (1996 [1965]), 37–8.

11. C. Achebe, No Longer at Ease (1994 [1960]), 121.

12. E. Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006).

13. Zachernuk, supra note 7, at 42.

14. Ibid., at 43.

15. Ibid., at 47.

16. Ibid.

17. See, e.g., ibid. at 164, 180, and he describes his subjects as ‘caught up in’ rather than employing a discourse. Ibid., at 182.

18. E. A. Ayandele, The Educated Elite in the Nigerian Society (1974).

19. Ibid., at 55.

20. Ibid., at 101.

21. R. W. July, An African Voice: The Role of the Humanities in African Independence (1987), 26–44. Négritude began as a movement among francophone black intellectuals and was joined by an anglophone ‘African personality’ movement, emphasizing both racial solidarity and strenuous anti-colonialism.

22. T. O. Elias, Government and Politics in Africa (1963 [1961]), 27.

23. T. Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition (1985), 211, 242.

24. Ibid., at 215.

25. Elias, supra note 1, at 5.

26. T. O. Elias, ‘Judicial Process and Legal Development in Africa’, in I. J. Mowoe and R. Bjornson (eds.), Africa and the West: The Legacies of Empire (1986), 189–213.

27. The subtitle for the conference at Ohio State was ‘The Challenge of African Humanism’. Ibid., at 5.

28. Elias, supra note 6, at 157.

29. Elias, supra note 22, at 265, n. 1.

30. Elias, supra note 6, at 203, 204 and 214. This, of course, would not keep him from talking in his Delhi lectures about the ‘excessive caution [of one of the Pan-African conferences] not to offend Western susceptibilities’. Elias, supra note 22, at 265.

31. Elias, supra note 22, at 92.

32. Ibid., at 48.

33. Ibid., at 209.

34. Ibid.

35. C. Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), 24.

36. Zachernuk, supra note 7, at 98–9.

37. S. Epelle, The Promise of Nigeria (1960), at 32.

38. M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.), African Political Systems (1975 [1940]).

39. Elias, supra note 6, at 37, 39.

40. Elias, supra note 22, at 118–19.

41. T. O. Elias, Nigerian Land Law (1971 [1951]), at 74 (emphasis in original).

42. Elias, supra note 22, at 226.

43. Ibid., at 227.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., at 228.

47. Ibid. Interesting in this context is the generative relationship between the British colonial experience in India and the growth of Utilitarianism; see E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India (1959).

48. Elias, supra note 22, at 236.

49. Epelle, supra note 37, at 45.

50. Ibid., at 55.

51. Achebe, supra note 8, at 21–2.

52. Ibid., at 24.

53. Ibid., at 26–7 (Achebe's formulation); D. Hamond and A. Jablo, The Africa that Never Was: Four Centuries of British Writing about Africa (1970).

54. Zachernuk, supra note 7, at 8.

55. July, supra note 21, at 141.

56. B. Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State (1992), 92, citing H. R. Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre), in a BBC lecture, The Listener, London, 1963.

57. July, supra note 21, at 137–8. But Diop's historical vision would be attacked in Kwame Anthony Appiah's In My Father's House in that ‘the Egyptianists – like all who have chosen to root Africa's modern identity in an imaginary history – require us to see the past as the moment of wholeness and unity; tie us to the values and beliefs of the past; and thus divert us (this critique is as old as Césaire's appraisal of Tempels) from the problems of the present and the hopes of the future.’ Appiah, supra note 8, at 176.

58. Elias, supra note 22, at 105.

59. Ibid., at 110.

60. Elias, supra note 6, at 3.

61. Ibid.

62. Ibid., at 4.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., at 5.

65. Ibid., at 6.

66. Ibid., at 7.

67. Ibid., at 8.

68. E. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (1968 [1958]), 81.

69. Ibid., at 87.

70. Elias, supra note 6, at 13, quoting B. Davidson, The Africans: An Entry to Cultural History (1969), 185.

71. Elias, supra note 6, at 14.

72. Ibid., at 15.

73. Ibid.

74. Bovill, supra note 68, at 80.

75. Y. Ouologuem, Bound to Violence, trans. Ralph Mannheim (1971, first published as Le devoir de violence, 1968).

76. C. R. Niven, A Short History of Nigeria (1965), 27.

77. J. Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997), 1.

78. Ranger, supra note 23, at 212.

79. Ibid., at 247.

80. July, supra note 21, at 48, quoted from H. U. Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa (1968), 3.

81. A. Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (2005), 15, quoting D. Guss, The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (2000), 14.

82. Piot, supra note 35, at 1.

83. Ranger, supra note 23, at 248.

84. Appiah, supra note 8, at 177.

85. Ranger, supra note 23, at 250 (emphasis in original).

86. Elias, supra note 1, at 12.

87. In Re Southern Rhodesia (1919), AC 211, cited in ibid., at 12.

88. Elias, supra note 41, at 111.

89. Elias, supra note 22, at 206.

90. Ibid., at 150.

91. Zachernuk, supra note 7, at 158.

92. Elias, supra note 22, at 212 (emphasis in original).

93. Elias, supra note 6, at 36.

94. Ibid., at 39.

95. Ibid., at 41, citing Government Printing Department, Gold Coast Legislative Council (1947), 34.

96. Elias, supra note 6, at 43.

97. Elias, supra note 41, at 115.

98. Ibid., at 131.

99. Elias, supra note 22, at 128.

100. Ibid., at 129–30.

101. Ibid., at 133–4.

102. Elias, supra note 41, at 147.

103. M. Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (1965), 21, 45, 48.

104. Elias, supra note 6, at 121–47.

105. ‘Taslim O. Elias, 76, Is Dead in Nigeria; Headed World Court’, New York Times, 16 August 1991.

106. Elias, supra note 6, at 123.

107. R. Friedland, A Guide to African International Organizations (1990), at 5.

108. Elias, supra note 6, at 124.

109. Ibid., at 124–5.

110. Ibid., at 121.

111. Ibid., at 123.

112. Ibid., at 124.

113. Ibid., at 127.

114. Ibid., at 129.

115. T. Falola, The History of Nigeria (1999), 146.

116. Elias, supra note 6, at 148, quoting para. 2 of Resolution ECM/Res. 13 (vi) (3 Dec. 1965).

117. Elias, supra note 6, at 157.

118. Ibid., at 159. In this context it is interesting to read Ali Mazrui's description of these events in his chapter on international relations in the immense book published by the African Studies programme at Northwestern University in 1970: ‘African states were often strongly united in a mood of denunciation on issues such as that of Rhodesia after the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Unity in action, however, was less common than unity in mood. When the African states passed a resolution to break off diplomatic relations with Britain over the Rhodesia issue, only nine fulfilled that resolution.’ A. A. Mazrui, ‘African International Relations’, in J. N. Paden and E. W. Soja (eds.), The African Experience: Essays (1970), I, 532, 538.

119. Elias, supra note 6, at 54.

120. Ibid., at 61.

121. Ibid., at 54.

122. Ibid.

123. Ibid., at 52 (emphasis in original).

124. Ibid., at 63.

125. Ibid., at 64.

126. Ibid., at 66.

127. Ibid., at 68.

128. Ibid., at 83.

129. Ibid., at 83–4.

130. A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2005), 198.

131. Elias, supra note 22, at 178–9.