Terror in the name of tradition - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source

From the Mail & Guardian of Jo'burg comes a very interesting article by an Oxford trained legal scholar on some of the absurdities and outrages of the South African government's policies regarding traditional tribal governance in the countryside.

To understand the scope of such a problem, imagine that our Indian reservations contained over half the land and half the people of the country and that, rather than imposing democratic forms (which was the US policy) we told them to go back to governing their territories by pre-Columbian standards.

There is an old saying that "hard cases make bad law" - and in this controversy it is possible that a particularly outrageous case might cause the pendulum to swing too far away from central government respect for traditional cultures.

The hard case is Buyelekhaya Dalindyebo, king of the amaThembu. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for exercising his traditional powers by his own lights. If you want the details, read the article - some of it is too gruesome for me to describe here. The king has responded by announcing on January 14 the intention to secede. His territory covers 60% of South Africa's territory.

Secession, were South Africa to allow it, might well (this is my opinion, not the author's) lead to rebellion if the people find themselves without any hope of redressing their grievances through the South African courts.

On the other hand, the ANC-led government and the courts are at loggerheads about just how much authority traditional leaders like the king of the amaThembu should have. If the government have their way, some of the acts for which the king was convicted might well be within the law.

I found this article and the accompanying comments particularly interesting for the light it sheds on the push to bring Islamic law to Europe. Can any country function with two fundamentally different legal systems?