Law, Custom, and Social Order: The Colonial Experience in Malawi and Zambia (Classics of African Studies Series)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

This book explores the historical formation during the colonial period of that part African law known as customary law. Martin Chanock treats the emergence of the customary law as an aspect of the social and economic transformation of African societies under colonial rule. He argues that African presentations of "customary" law was one of the ways Africans tried to control the disrupting effects of the changes they experienced as a consequence of colonial impositions. Chanock also shows how African ideas, aspirations, and activities regarding law, and the rudiments of customary law, were shaped by interaction with the legal ideas of the British colonizers, their understandings of African societies, and the judicial institutions of the colonial state.

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