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African Customary Law, Customs, and Women's Rights
Open accessAbstract
The sources of law in most African countries are customary law, the common law and legislation both colonial and post-independence. In a typical African country, the great majority of the people conduct their personal activities in accordance with and subject to customary law. Customary law has great impact in the area of personal law in regard to matters such as marriage, inheritance and traditional authority, and because it developed in an era dominated by patriarchy some of its norms conflict with human rights norms guaranteeing equality between men and women. While recognizing the role of legislation in reform, it is argued that the courts have an important role to play in ensuring that customary law is reformed and developed to ensure that it conforms to human rights norms and contributes to the promotion of equality between men and women. The guiding principle should be that customary law is living law and cannot therefore be static. It must be interpreted to take account of the lived experiences of the people it serves.\nHuman Rights and Legal Systems Across the Global South, Symposium, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, Indiana. 9-10 April 2010.
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“In Ghana, faced with similar problems, the courts have shown flexibility and readiness to nullify customary norms that discriminate against women.”
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“Judges interpreted this situation as permitting the application of provisions of customary law that discriminated against women.”
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“The fact that the postdemocratization constitutions do not immunize customary law against scrutiny based on human rights norms is very significant for women's rights because customary law embodies and underpins customs and traditions that discriminate against women.”
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“Judges are increasingly asserting the supremacy of human rights norms and declaring customary discriminatory norms unconstitutional or invalid and inapplicable in modern society.”
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“For decades, decisions by African courts took a static view of customary law and did little to mitigate its discriminatory operation against women.69”
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§ 107. (2005) eKLR.
“145.2009 (2) SA 66 (CC) T 54.”
§ 166. Id. 172.
“150.2008 (2) SA 66 (CC) 44-49.”
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§ II. EMERGING JURISPRUDENCE IN THE ERA OF HUMAN RIGHTS
“A similar approach can be found in the 1985 Uganda Constitution, which in article 33 provides that”
§ 53.
“56.CONSTITUTION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UGANDA 1995, ch. 4, art.33.”
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Women in Judiciaries Across Africa
Dawuni, J. J. (2021) · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28099-4_75 · Cited by 1
Women in Judiciaries Across Africa
Dawuni, J. J. (2020) · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-77030-7_75-2 · Cited by 1
Ngubane, S. (2019) · International Journal of Law and Society · doi:10.11648/j.ijls.20190203.11 · Cited by 1
“Prior to colonisation, the applicable law in most African states was customary, having its sources in the practices, traditions, and customs of the people [24].”
BackgroundAbdulkadir, F., & Abdulkadir, R. (2018) · Gender, development and social change · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-77890-7_13 · Cited by 1
Amaechi, P., & Mildner, E. (2014) · Scholarship @ Cornell Law (Cornell University) · Cited by 1
Shachar, A. (2013) · Human Rights · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511758553.009 · Cited by 1
Sungay, M. H., & Schyff, L. V. D. (2026) · Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal/Potchefstroomse Elektroniese Regsblad · doi:10.17159/1727-3781/2026/v29i0a23291
Customary Law Practices in the ‘Tribal Women’ of Sikkim
Mukhia, A., & Chhetri, K. (2026) · Contemporary Voice of Dalit · doi:10.1177/2455328x261476933
Gedi, A. I. (2026) · Research Square · doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-10670567/v1
Metadata
- Authors
- Ndulo
- Affiliations
- Indiana University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Ndulo
- Venue
- Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies
- Publisher
- Indiana University Press
- Published
- 2011
- Volume
- 18
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 87
- ISSN
- 1080-0727 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2001975792
- Cited by
- 170
- References
- 13
- Citations by year
- 2026: 22 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 16 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 27 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 3 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 4 · 2012: 2
- FWCI
- 51.51
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- scholarworks.iu.edu
- Locations
- Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (publishedVersion)
- Indiana Magazine of History (Indiana University) (submittedVersion)
- Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (submittedVersion)
- Scholarship @ Cornell Law (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
- bepress Legal Repository (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Indigenous Peoples' Rights and Law
- Social Sciences › Law › Family and Matrimonial Law
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies
- Keywords
- African customary law, women's rights, gender equality, patriarchy, customary law reform, personal law, marriage, inheritance, traditional authority, human rights standards, living law
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-11, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).
A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-11 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
