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Subject: search.filters.subject.Customary law. South Africa

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    African customary law: Its social and ideological function in South Africa
    (1983-10-13) Suttner, Raymond
    The study of the terms and mode of application of African customary law in South Africa has generally been neglected both by lawyers and African Studies scholars. In the case of lawyers, there is little interest in a law potentially relevant to seventy per cent of the population - where that seventy per cent is for the most part unable to pay lawyers' fees. In the case of students of African studies, the segregated legal and judicial systems may seem of marginal consequence, in the light of the more serious disabilities that people experience through more patently repressive laws, such as those regulating influx control, resettlement, banishment etc., let alone laws concerning directly political activities. It would nevertheless be wrong, I shall try to show, to dismiss this area as unimportant or innocuous. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the special court and legal system set up to deal with civil cases between Africans, contributes ideologically, economically and socially, to the national oppression of the African people.
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    Customary law and the government of Africans in South Africa in the transition to a unitary state
    (1998-05-25) Costa, Anthony
    'The way in which white has governed black in South Africa during approximately the past century', formed the focus of Edgar Brookes's History of Native Policy published in 1924.' Over the years, colonialism, segregation and apartheid have served as alternative labels for 'native policy', purported answers to the question 'What is the appropriate manner in which to govern Africans?' Responses to this question, and the particular role of customary law, form the subject of this paper, and its argument that by the end of the nineteenth century, the ground had been laid, in the Cape and Natal, for the recognition of African forms of government, including customary law, a development which may be located in the philosophies of indirect rule and liberalism. Africans were to be governed by 'traditional' structures, while the imperatives of progress were heeded by providing for the development of individuals.