‘Criminal’ Jir and The Problem of Self-Help

Eerlier in this book I stated that I adopted the classification of the cases heard by the MbaDuku Grade-D court into civil and criminal, not because it was a standard European distinction, but rather because the scribe of MbaDuku jir classified them in that way. The fact that the distinction is of European origin is momentarily beside the point—it is, today, a distinction found amongst Tiv. ¹