African customary justice : living law, legal pluralism, and public ethics
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Bibliographic Information
African customary justice : living law, legal pluralism, and public ethics
Routledge, 2022
- ; pbk
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Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-271) and index
Summary: "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 postcolony'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
Contents of Works
- Introduction : Living Law, Public Ethics and Legal Pluralism
- Looking Back: Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law in a Tswapong Village
- Tlholego : Nature, Culture and Destiny
- The Oracular Court of Sedimo vs. the Customary Court
- An Unburied Past : Chiefly Succession and the Politics of Memory
- What's in a Name? The Struggle for Identity in Statutory Courts
- Divorce as Process, Botswana Style : Customary Courts and Gender Activism
- Adultery as Process, Botswana Style : Gender and Changing Customary Law
- Inheritance as Turmoil : From Citizens' Forum to Magisterial Justice
- A Case of Insult : Emotions, Law and Witchcraft Accusations
- A Moral Economy of Crime and the Proportionality of Punishment
- Conclusion
