British Justice and the Native Tribunals of the Southern Gold Coast Colony

Abstract

As a result of the policy of indirect rule which British administrators introduced into the Colony of the Gold Coast at the turn of the twentieth century, customary courts, or what were called Native Tribunals, became important venues of adjudication for the indigenous population. As a result, however, of the powerful impact of British justice on the Colony, the judicial responsibilities, procedure, personnel and the nature of the customary law that these courts applied underwent profound changes. It was an excellent example of how important was the cultural interchange between European and African ideas during the colonial period, which, however, both academic lawyers and historians have neglected. The former have preferred to focus on the superior courts as venues of juridical interaction while the latter have focused far more on ‘what was said about change than what was said about order’. By looking, however, at this example of cultural interaction on a fundamentally popular level, we can see that this ‘transforming moment’ in the colonial situation can be seen neither as something ‘imposed’ on African society by colonial administrators nor as simply generating new mechanisms for privileged groups to take advantage of. The Native Tribunals never fully came up to what British administrators or African lawyers considered the highest standards of British rule of law. Nevertheless, their most important function was to popularize recourse to judicial institutions which increasingly adopted more and more of the features of the British legal system.