The Kenya African Courts hear in a year about twice as many criminal charges as all the Magistrate's Courts of the Colony together, yet the nature of their functioning is very little known in legal circles. Their jurisdiction in criminal matters extends over some 27 sections of the Penal Code including theft and indecent assault, and over a large variety of offences under other laws, as well as over all African District Council By-laws. This paper aims to give a picture of certain illuminating peculiarities in their administration of this body of criminal law. It is based on the records of individual cases and on knowledge gained from hearing appeals from African Courts and on listening to cases being conducted. The North Nyanza Courts, where the material was gathered, are amongst the most advanced in Kenya, having a staff of elders and clerks of a higher average educational level than those of most other districts.

As I read Dr. Allott's article “Towards a definition of Absolute Ownership” I felt increasing dismay because it postulates and makes appear immensely difficult, a problem which in actual working practice barely exists at all. For over sixty years Settlement Officers in the Sudan have been successfully determining ownership without the help of any definition, and in Kenya, during the last five years, the ownership of over a million plots has similarly been decided by committees. Even in West Africa, where there has been no process of systematic adjudication, ownership has been determined in over three thousand cases in Lagos, and ownership is not defined. Indeed I am not familiar with any statute anywhere which does define it.

A British Section of the Association was formed on 16th December, 1961, at an Inaugural Meeting in London, which was attended by a number of interested persons. It was envisaged that one of the major functions of the Section might be to collect and distribute information on work in progress in the United Kingdom in the African legal field. As it is at present very difficult to discover what work is being done by different institutions, the Chairman and Secretary of the British Section wrote to institutions which had, or might have, an interest in African legal studies, in order to ascertain what activities were in progress or had recently been completed.