Criminal Homicide in Western Nigeria 1966–1972

Abstract

This research began as an attempt to add a codicil to the work on homicide done by Paul Bohannan in the 1950s.2 Although Bohannan looked at events in the colonial period, his appreciation of the way in which cultural norms are expressed in legal institutions is still relevant. The criminal code in Western Nigeria is almost entirely British; it is applied by Nigerian judges to Nigerian accused who are counselled by Nigerian lawyers. The crime of homicide is universal. How a man kills, whom he kills, his motive for killing, and why it is most often a man who kills another man, may all be primarily determined by culture. The precise influence of social and cultural factors upon criminal patterns is impossible to measure. Yet to ignore what cannot be isolated is to commit a gross, but it seems to me inescapable, error. Often it seemed what was possible to tabulate was the least important information, that the conclusions which could be substantiated were trivial or irrelevant. Homicide recommended itself as a crime serious enough to test the efficacy of the Western Nigerian criminal justice system. Yet there are few conclusions here about the nature of that system’s authority. As elsewhere, in Western Nigeria the institutions of criminal justice seem to sit on the surface of the society. The criminal processes are unfamiliar to most people. Often after an accused is taken into custody it is difficult to find relatives or friends to inform about the progress of his case. At the moment of arrest, an accused steps into a totally strange, and largely foreign, world, one from which he may never return. What follows does not attempt to explain such subtle and difficult aspects of criminal law in Western Nigeria; it is an attempt to describe the way in which one particular serious crime was handled by Western Nigerian legal institutions during a specific period of time.