Pluralismo jurídico em África: Ficção ou realidade?

Abstract

If it is widely accepted today that legal pluralism tends to be present in every society, several specificities confer distinctive contours on the debate of this issue in the African context. In a continent deeply marked by the experience of colonial domination, a reading which conceives of customary rights, not as normative rules which survived in a parallel dimension to colonial law, but as an imposition of colonialism, designed to control and exploit the population – such a reading has stoked an intense debate on the quality of contemporary legal pluralism. This article discusses whether legal pluralism in post-colonial Africa is a fiction, alien to its citizens, fabricated as part of the colonial ideology of indirect rule, or whether it is a legitimate reality which tends to contribute towards promoting access to justice.

Keywords

• legal pluralism
• invention of tradition
• access to justice
• colonialism and post-colonialism
• Africa