The authority of the elders or the colonisers? Customary law and culture – which legal skills?

This paper discusses findings from a pre-pandemic study of the legal skills associated with customary law. The data were collected from documentary sources, qualitative interviews, observations of 15 Anglophone African university law schools and 100 informants from different Anglophone African jurisdictions as well as information from professors of Indigenous Law at one American law school. To provide a greater insight into the research phenomenon, the paper focuses on countries that use multiple justice systems in order to highlight a conflict of laws and the justification for using skills drawn from customary law. The findings suggest that litigating cases with elements of customary law and culture requires a diversity of skills that are often incoherently integrated into the existing curriculum of training lawyers. The paper, therefore, recommends the use of clinical methods for training lawyers so that they are able to resolve cases involving customary law and culture.