Presents the legal history of Rhodesia where African custom and Western law clashed forcibly - marriage regulations, sexual offences, witch-craft and homicide. This book explores such varied phenomena as African resistance to marriage registration, reverence for diviners, and the threat to political authority posed by witchcraft.

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.