Legal publications in an African vernacular

Abstract

Most territories in Africa south of the Sahara have produced some printed works in a vernacular language for the guidance of African courts. In the Kingdom of Buganda, however, during the last five years the whole corpus of statutory law and case law administered by the Kabaka's courts has been published in several bilingual series which may be of interest to those engaged in the development of judicial systems elsewhere in Africa.2 Spurred on by the comment of a recent reviewer,3 I propose now to describe these publications and the evolution of a technical legal vocabulary in Luganda, the language of the Ganda.