ABSTRACT
Where English law insists that legal relations must be at least bilateral, African customary law appears to permit the existence of single-ended legal relations, such as, for instance, the alleged vesting of rights in property in a deity or the ancestors. This might be taken to indicate a completely different approach to the analysis of legal obligations. African law is not dominated by procedural considerations, as is English law. It is instructive to see how far the three tests which one would employ in English law to decide who has legal personality, and what such legal personality implies, are applicable to African legal institutions. African customary laws are typically laws of, or based on, groups and communities, social and political. The study of group-personality in African law is thus inescapably the most important task both from the jurisprudence and from the more narrowly African points of view.
