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Following the 1898 Southern Rhodesia Order in Council which effectively removed all criminal authority from the traditional African courts of Rhodesia, sole criminal jurisdiction was exercised by the European courts. This volume is a history of court decisions in the area in which African custom and Western law clashed most forcibly - marriage regulations, sexual offenses, witch-craft and homicide. In each of these areas, Professor Mittle-beeler presents the significant cases and judicial opinions, statutory enactments, and surrounding legislative debate. Reconstructing Rhodesia's legal history, he is constantly concerned with the interplay of African custom and Western law. In his effort to chart the ways in which custom was thwarted, accommodated, or supported, he presents each case in detail, supplementing the sketchier accounts with anthropological information.Whether tracing the uncertain evolution of matrimonial law - which attempted to accommodate some traditional practice - or the all-out effort to eliminate witchcraft - which decisively reversed customary values - Mittlebeeler provides a comprehensive view of the forces that have moved participants on both sides of the conflict and a careful record of the shifting resolutions that have been reached in the past seventy years. In his effort to clarify beliefs and motives, he explores such varied phenomena as African resistance to marriage registration, reverence for diviners, demands of bureaucratic administration, and the threat to political authority posed by witchcraft.In presenting each case, he examines the custom which may lie behind the violation of Western law - 'seed bearing' in an alleged act of adultery, fertility sacrifice encompassed in ritual murder, martial rights exercised in an alleged rape Chr(45) and the doctrines, conscious and unconscious, which judges have followed and legislators enjoined. Although as a legal historian the author focuses upon particular cases and statutes, in a lengthy concluding section he turns to the actual administration of law in Rhodesia, and the problems which confront any African government - black or white - in attempting to reconcile traditional beliefs with modernity and forge some measure of national unity. Rhodesia's legal history is peculiarly its own, but what can be learned from that history extends well beyond Rhodesia's boundaries.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Following the 1898 Southern Rhodesia Order in Council which effectively removed all criminal authority from the traditional African courts of Rhodesia, sole criminal jurisdiction was exercised by the European courts. This volume is a history of court decisions in the area in which African custom and Western law clashed most forcibly - marriage regulations, sexual offenses, witch-craft and homicide. In each of these areas, Professor Mittle-beeler presents the significant cases and judicial opinions, statutory enactments, and surrounding legislative debate. Reconstructing Rhodesia's legal history, he is constantly concerned with the interplay of African custom and Western law. In his effort to chart the ways in which custom was thwarted, accommodated, or supported, he presents each case in detail, supplementing the sketchier accounts with anthropological information.Whether tracing the uncertain evolution of matrimonial law - which attempted to accommodate some traditional practice - or the all-out effort to eliminate witchcraft - which decisively reversed customary values - Mittlebeeler provides a comprehensive view of the forces that have moved participants on both sides of the conflict and a careful record of the shifting resolutions that have been reached in the past seventy years. In his effort to clarify beliefs and motives, he explores such varied phenomena as African resistance to marriage registration, reverence for diviners, demands of bureaucratic administration, and the threat to political authority posed by witchcraft.In presenting each case, he examines the custom which may lie behind the violation of Western law - 'seed bearing' in an alleged act of adultery, fertility sacrifice encompassed in ritual murder, martial rights exercised in an alleged rape Chr(45) and the doctrines, conscious and unconscious, which judges have followed and legislators enjoined. Although as a legal historian the author focuses upon particular cases and statutes, in a lengthy concluding section he turns to the actual administration of law in Rhodesia, and the problems which confront any African government - black or white - in attempting to reconcile traditional beliefs with modernity and forge some measure of national unity. Rhodesia's legal history is peculiarly its own, but what can be learned from that history extends well beyond Rhodesia's boundaries.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)