Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
This draft is an attempt to meet a particular difficulty, which is likely to occur not infrequently in African countries where the present land law is dualistic in character and represents a partial amalgamation, or co-existence, of English and customary laws relating to land. Increasingly these two bodies of law will tend to draw together (as they have already done to a considerable extent in West Africa), and legislation will have to be prepared from time to time which is capable of applying both to interests held under English law and to interests under various sorts of customary law. This is pre-eminently the case where any proposal for registration, of title to land is involved, since the register (if it is not accompanied by a radical revision of the substantive land law) will have to show under as few heads as possible the different sorts of title that can exist in respect of land, under customary as well as under English law (where the latter forms the basis of the general law of the territory).