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African Customary Justice: Living Law, Legal Pluralism, and Public Ethics

African Customary Justice: Living Law, Legal Pluralism, and Public Ethics

Author: Pnina Werbner; Richard Werbner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781032149431
Published In: December 2021
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Contents

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This book presents an important ethnographic and theoretical advance in legal anthropological scholarship by interrogating customary law, customary courts and legal pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. It highlights the vitality and continued relevance of customary justice at a time when customary courts have waned or even disappeared in many postcolonial African nations.

Taking Botswana as a casestudy from in-depth fieldwork over a fifty-year period, the book shows, the ‘customary’ is robustly enduring, central to settling interpersonal disputes and constitutive of the local as well as the national public ethics. Customary law continues to be constitutionally protected, authorised by the country’s past as an authentic, viable legacy, from the British colonial period of indirect rule, to the postcolony’s present development as a highly bureaucratised democracy. Along with a theoretical overview of the underlying issues for the anthropology and sociology of law, the book documents customary law as living law in the context of legal pluralism. It takes a legal realist approach and highlights the need to pay close attention to the lived experience of justice and its role in the production of legal subjectivities.

The book will be valuable to Africanists but also, more broadly, to social scientists, social historians and socio-legal scholars with interests in law and social change, public ethics and personal morality, and the intersection of politics and judicial decision-making.

1. Introduction: Living Law, Public Ethics and Legal Pluralism

PART ONE: PUBLIC ETHICS AND LEGAL PLURALISM

2. Looking Back: Small Man Politics and the Rule of Law in a Tswapong Village

3. Tlholego: Nature, Culture and Destiny

4. The Oracular Court of Sedimo vs. the Customary Court

5. An Unburied Past: Chiefly Succession and the Politics of Memory

6. What’s in a Name? The Struggle for Identity in Statutory Courts

PART TWO: LEGAL SUBJECTIVITIES, ETHICS AND PLURALISM

7. Divorce as Process, Botswana Style: Customary Courts and Gender Activism

8. Adultery as Process, Botswana Style: Gender and Changing Customary Law

9. Inheritance as Turmoil: From Citizens’ Forum to Magisterial Justice

10. A Case of Insult: Emotions, Law and Witchcraft Accusations