In many states, more developed or less developed, the general populace does not seek redress through the court system, does not have access to legal interpretation of constitutional provisions, and is little affected by juridical decisions concerning human rights, To the majority in the Third World, dispute resolution through customary law may be of more relevance, and what matters most to the average person is how she or he is affected by the planning and daily practice of government and other bureaucratic institutions. This paper will review some aspects of political and economic development in Tanzania and Kenya since their attainment of independence from Britain, and will attempt to relate their experience to international agreements for the promotion of human rights.

During the past 50 years, the study of African customary law has been enthusiastically pursued. The growing awareness of this subject has, at the same time, stimulated a critical awareness of the problem of its place in the legal system of an African state. With the attitudes of modern African nations, the place of customary law is necessarily an ambiguous one. Because the colonial governments' application of customary law and European law was determined, primarily, by the race of the litigants, this was frequently perceived as discriminatory and, hence, antithetical to the views of African nationalism. On the other hand, it is true that customary law, the law of the African people, reflects the traditional African culture, whereas the imported systems of Western European law reflect European values and attitudes. At an even more fundamental level, customary law is regarded as representing the old social order. As such, it is often perceived to be in opposition to the new social order represented by the European legal systems. The latter are usually more in keeping with the demands of modern society, particularly in the public and commercial sphere, whereas customary law is suited, rather, to the simple, face-to-face societies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

This article is a condensed version of a much longer paper,* the purpose of which was to explore the viability of the approach to legal care which has been adopted by Nigeria within the cultural background and the prevailing social and economic conditions. In the original, therefore, there were additional sections devoted to: (a) the concept of legal care, including a brief examination of the role of the lawyer in developing countries, (b) the social and economic background, and (c) the difficulties experienced by accused persons within a plurality of cultural, language and legal systems. It is not possible to deal with these topics adequately within the space of a short article, and the main focus will, therefore, be the legal aid scheme itself, except for some brief background remarks in the introduction.