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The Administrators and the Law in British East Africa

Those who teach the colonial period of African history will welcome this collection of nine essays in which the contributions by an ex-administrator historian are balanced against those by an academic lawyer. The book claims, in fact, to be an attempt to 'bridge the gap between law and history', and it seems largely to succeed: the analysis of the relationship between administrative policy and questions of law and justice certainly illumines the history of the East African territories in the inter-war period. As the authors remark, this relationship is one seldom before investigated—which is surprising if it is reflected that not only was 'law and order' supposed to be one of the main benefits of colonial rule, but also that colonial legal activities must have involved fundamental encounters between African and European modes of thought and behaviour. Morris and Read do not describe African legal conceptions as such. Rather, they are concerned with the arguments between administrators and lawyers about how English law and practice could be adapted to African conditions, and how far 'customary law', as they understood it, could be officially recognized and applied. Whether the disputes were basically part of a 'search for justice' or merely differences about how to rule with the greatest economy and efficiency, is a question left open, but certainly the issues became all the more important in a situation where the British were committed to policies of indirect rule.