{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0217296827466319, 'fraction_numerical': 0.000869187309865276, 'mean_word_length': 5.204851752021563, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Private international law in Commonwealth Africa

Having written about aspects of private international law in various African states, and having completed a book on private international law in Ghana, Dr Richard Frimpong Oppong, in this book, engages in a yet more extensive and demanding task. He examines and discusses critically all aspects of private international law in 15 Commonwealth African countries (including Zimbabwe, which has been suspended from membership of the Commonwealth and has declared its permanent withdrawal, and Gambia which withdrew around the time of publication). The book does not consider the laws of the five other Commonwealth countries in the African Union, namely, Cameroon, Mauritius, Mozambique, Rwanda and Seychelles. They were presumably omitted for the good reason that each of them has a law which for historical reasons is considerably different from that of the other African Commonwealth states. The countries chosen have laws which to some extent resemble each other. Nevertheless, the book shows that there are deep differences between a sub-group of nine (Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia), which can be classed as having common law systems, and the other six (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe) in which Roman–Dutch law applies, although strong strands of common law are also woven into their laws. The form of the inquiry is largely determined by the histories and circumstance of the countries studied. Almost all are political entities of recent, colonial creation, their territories having been determined mainly by the drawing of lines on maps at European conferences in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The colonial power needed to provide a legal system for the newly established government of each territory. In those which became common law countries this was done largely by importing English law. In the Southern Africa territories it was done by continuing, with some adaptation, the law which the previous Dutch government had introduced into the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope, and then extending that law to the other states of what became the Union of South Africa, and thereafter to the other territories of Southern Africa as they were brought