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The Clash of Legal Cultures: The Treatment of Indigenous Law in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Copyright Year | 2006 |
| Abstract | The historic Berlin Conference on Africa in 1885 is often credited with the official beginning of colonialism in Africa. However, this Conference, held among the principal colonial European powers (Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, and Portugal), essentially marked the agreement among those powers to define territorial areas of influence in Africa. Long before this Conference, individual European powers had reached their own accommodation with indigenous peoples of Africa in various corners of the continent. Thus, in the southern part of Ghana, then called the Gold Coast, the Bond of 1844 was signed by the British and the local chiefs in the southern part of the country under which the locals accepted British sovereignty or dominion over them in exchange for protection from their warlike neighbors further to the north. Indeed, Europeans interacted with the peoples of Africa for centuries before 1844. In the Gold Coast, for example, as far back as 1475, the Portuguese had set foot at a coastal place they called Elmina (Portuguese for “the mine”). However, the Portuguese did not have much success with colonialism in West Africa. In the Gold Coast, they were kicked out successively by the Dutch and then the English, and the territory became a British colony. The story of the legal relationship between European and African legal systems that intrigues comparative lawyers starts in the 19th Century. As part of the Colonial Administration, the British naturally wanted to enforce law and order and to generally regulate the lives and habits of the people that they conquered. This was not always easy for the British, both as a practical matter and as a matter of legal doctrine and ideology. They encountered a legal system quite different from their |
| Starting Page | 4 |
| Ending Page | 4 |
| Page Count | 1 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Volume Number | 39 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.uakron.edu/law/lawreview/volumes/v39/docs/issue2/Ocran1.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1282&context=akronlawreview&httpsredir=1&referer= |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
