Native Courts, Local Courts, Chieftaincy and the CPP in Ghana in the 1950s
Title:
Native Courts, Local Courts, Chieftaincy and the CPP in Ghana in the 1950s
Author:
Rathbone, Richard
Appeared in:
Journal of African cultural studies
Paging:
Volume 13 (2000) nr. 1 pages 125-139
Year:
2000-06-01
Contents:
The colonial Gold Coast was subject to a binary legal system. The majority of crimes and civil matters which affected Africans, especially those living in the countryside, were dealt with in Native Courts. These were run in accordance with what was understood to be customary law and were presided over by chiefs and their councillors. By the 1930s, this system was widely agreed to be an inefficient and often unfair justice system. The British shied away from reform of the system for political and economic reasons. In 1951, the advent of a popularly elected African government, that of the Convention Peoples' Party, which was hostile to the rule of chiefs in the countryside promised that reform. Although the evidence suggested that the entire system demanded overhaul, such change was endlessly delayed. The evidence in this piece suggests that the CPP government employed instead a legal tactic which allowed them to remove chiefs, especially those who opposed the CPP, from these courts without altering the fundamental nature of the system itself until considerably after independence. The argument is that the CPP largely achieved its desired political end of reducing the legal authority of chiefs by altering the lists of those scheduled to hear cases in favour of its own supporters. Not only were their political ambitions met by such change, but as government they were also thus able to avoid the high cost of reform, as the financial implications of modernizing and professionalizing the judicial system were considerable.
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