Provision for the redemption of alienated land exists in the customary law of many African tribes. Nor is it confined to Africa. Rattray, in discussing land redemption among the Ashanti, quotes the Levitical law of the Old Testament:

“The land shall not be sold for ever for the land is mine … if thy brother be waxen poor and has sold away some of his possessions and if any of his kin come to redeem then shall he redeem that which his brother sold.”

The use of assessors in Courts of Admiralty in England is of long standing. The first reported case in which they are mentioned is probably The Ann of Mostein, but there is an even earlier reference to the practice of seeking advice from the Trinity House Masters dating from the beginning of the seventeenth century. The true status and function of assessors in England is not in doubt, but the same cannot be said of assessors in criminal trials in Africa, and the aim of this chapter is to clarify the position as far as possible. It is intended first to describe the law governing trial with assessors in the superior courts, then to discuss some of the problems that have arisen, and finally to attempt to define the true role of the assessor.

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).