ABSTRACT
On the whole, the tone for the need to preserve traditional values and the customary law in which they are manifested is generally not sufficiently critical, considering the demand for change under the contemporary circumstances. This is an understandable defensive response to the culturally based denigration, humiliation, and domination that the South has suffered since independence, indeed since the advent of foreign domination, which dates back even further. Theirs is a revivalist sense of attachment to the culture as a component of a highly valued identity for which the South fought a prolonged war and in which millions died. There is also ambivalence about the human rights pressures for reform related to the status of women and children, for which the traditional system has been strongly and rightly criticized, but on which customary law is, as a reaction, becoming romanticized and idealized. And yet, despite the consensus in support of customary law, there is a realization that changes to customs, beliefs, and practices throughout Southern Sudan are inevitable. What this means is that there has to be a delicate balance between the
stability of conforming to traditional norms and adjusting to changing conditions, perspectives, and expectations. Some of these changes are already dictating themselves and the law needs to catch up with the realities on the ground. In other areas, the law needs to play an educational role by prescribing normative standards that transcend the traditional code. The precise details of what is needed to bridge the traditional code with the imperatives and the ideals of a new framework corresponding to modern imperatives and principles of nondiscrimination based on gender or age still need to be worked out. Because of the delicacy of the issues, change must be a selfpropelled process of improvement from within rather than an imposition from outside. Reflecting on reform in both programmatic and substantive areas of both
the informal and the formal systems, a realistic approach will envisage three interactive processes: resolution of the formal national legal system, presumably of common law origins that will meet the needs of the emerging modern society; classification of the principles of the informal system needed to address the needs of the indigenous community at the transitional phases;
and the development of an integrated national legal system that will build on the principles of both informal and formal systems, ultimately producing a national code that will synthesize the most desirable principles of both systems.
