... morally binding. The positivist orientation in most of the Western legal scholarship on African laws reflects the narrow lego-centric and euro-centric approaches that are simply not adequate for a globally focused comparative legal analysis. From a positivist perspective, traditional African laws as non-state laws were not recognised as belonging to the field of legal studies. This follows from the same vein that Africans are primitive and hence, do not have proper laws and should 'modernise' out of their current situation. Another Western view of Africans and their legal system was that they were assumed not to have the capacity for sophisticated thought, purely in the legal sense, and therefore, European legal observers failed to notice (and accept) the forms of law, as Africans recognised them. Many school traditions were used to thinking of Africans as not having a 'proper' form of law, some were even appalled by the current form ...

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