The local courts of Zambia are the successors to the native courts which the British set up in Northern Rhodesia, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, to administer justice to Africans. However, while the system of native courts originally existed in parallel with the system of English-style magistrates' courts, after independence the native courts (re-named local courts) were integrated into the judicial system, with appeals lying to subordinate courts (i.e. magistrates' courts) of the first or second class. Although it was the ultimate goal of the government to have a fully professionalised judiciary (a policy adopted by Kenya in 1967), it recognised that the local courts still had an important role to play in the administration of justice, particularly in the rural areas. Twenty years later it looks as if their future is secure. If the amount of business transacted by the local courts and the paucity of appeals from their decisions provide an indication of their popularity and effectiveness, they would seem to have proved their worth.

Like their predecessors, the local courts have a limited criminal jurisdiction, but the bulk of their business is civil. They have jurisdiction in most civil matters where the claim does not exceed 200 kwacha. Some of these cases are actions for the recovery of a debt, actions for assault or actions for defamation of character (most frequently, accusations of witchcraft), but the majority of the cases could be broadly categorised as “family” cases, including divorce, adultery, seduction and inheritance claims.

From the evidence of the minute paper which preceded the drafting of the first African reception statute, it may be asserted that the intendment of the Colonial Office officials was:

(1) that the limiting date in the statute was to apply as well to the common law and the doctrines of equity as to the statutes of general application;

(2) that the phrase “Imperial Laws”, refers as well to the common law and doctrines of equity as to the statutes of general application, so that the West African courts were granted a plenitude of power to determine the applicability to local conditions of judge-made law as well as legislation.

It is difficult, however, to determine the intendent of the phrase, “statutes of general application”, in the premises.

The problems of the absence or infrequency of states parties reports to the African Commission and the inadequacy of many that are submitted needs to be addressed. At the 25th session of the African Commission, South Africa presented its initial report. This process before, during and after the examination of the report is discussed and provides both encouragement for states to comply with their reporting obligations under the African Charter and useful lessons for states wishing to improve the quality of their reports.

The United Nations is entering the third development decade designated by a resolution which is part of the series now consisting of three texts which have guided the efforts of the United Nations over the last 20 years. The present document took a long time to produce and was the object of particular care and attention. The General Assembly resolution of 17 December, 1977, provided that:

— all negotiations should be conducted within the framework of U.N. institutions

— an extraordinary session of the General Assembly should be held in 1980 to assess and to identify the new strategy for development

— a plenary committee should be established, open to all member states, to prepare for the meeting of the Extraordinary Session in 1980.

On the one hand the third decade was to open “global negotiation” and the plenary committee was to prepare the ground for these negotiations; on the other hand, a committee was to devise the new strategy and to present it to the Eleventh Special Session. Those were the two aims; and the Group of 77 were determined to link them in a single ten-year-plan, in what is called in the U.N. terminology a ten years strategy. Three of these strategies have been adopted so far. The General Assembly in its resolutions A/1710 (XVI) and A/1715 (XVI), 19 December, 1961, declared the period 1960–70 the first U.N. Decade of development: a period in which special efforts should be made by all, in favour of those who live in the less developed countries.

The description of Bali matrimonial law which follows is based on research undertaken during the first half of 1969, while the author was on secondment from the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London to the Faculty of Law and Economic Sciences of the Federal University of Cameroon.

The law of divorce forms part of a wider subject known as family law,2 and regulates the conditions and procedure for dissolving a marriage3 and the consequences attaching to such a dissolution.

English law, as limited or modified, applies as one of the residual systems of law in Northern Nigeria, the other being customary law. The assumption underlying both the reception of English law and the retention of customary law was that both would be eroded and a new system would be created by local legislation and local decisions. While some erosion of both systems has taken place, such a process is necessarily slow and there remains a large area of law where the relationship of the received and retained law to local legislation is difficult to elaborate with any degree of precision. This is particularly true of the relationship of English law to the provisions of the Land Tenure Law and its predecessor, the Land and Native Rights Ordinance. The primary difficulty encountered in this context is the analogy which can be drawn between a lease in English form and the statutory right of occupancy, since the latter interest is granted by the appropriate authority normally, although not necessarily, for a definite term of years and may be governed by covenants which relate to rent, use and occupation, assignment and subletting, recovery of possession and so on.

The Wills and Inheritance Act,1 passed by the Malawi Parliament in November, 1967, is an attempt to provide a comprehensive scheme of interlocking succession provisions applicable to members of all racial groups. This is an ambitious objective and there is little need to stress here the numerous difficulties which stand in the way of its attainment. The greatest of these difficulties is to formulate a set of rules for those persons hitherto subject to diverse systems of customary law. Here the need is not only for a scheme which strikesan acceptable balance between the contemporary demands of the customary heirs and those of the immediate family, but also for one which is sufficiently flexible to accommodate the further changes which are bound to take place. Preferably the new rules will also be effective to guide future developments along lines which are deemed to be socially desirable. A further difficulty is to combine with this scheme the rules applicable to those persons who were not previously subject to customary law. Lastly, the system as a whole must be simple enough, in the case of small estates at least, to be administered in the Local Courts. It is against these requirements that the new Act will be measured in this note.

In Kenya there are no restrictions as to where a farmer may borrow money for the development of his farm and almost all institutions which lend money give considerable financial assistance to farmers. Kenya's economy is based largely on agriculture and the government has always supported agricultural industries in every way possible; one of these ways has been to make money available to farmers. To carry out this function, the government set up various institutions for the lending of money for agricultural purposes. Most of those institutions have now been dissolved and a few of those remaining are no longer actively engaged in the lending of money. At the present time, the main government credit institution is the Agricultural Finance Corporation.

During the last two or three decades there have been a number of significant developments in the application of Islamic law in Africa. Most of these are discussed in some detail in my recent book, Law Reform in the Muslim World, so I will confine myself here to the barest summary.