Introduction

Among the Dinka, what looks like defamation in the form of song may be almost a compliment. Nobody wastes time or trouble on criticising a poor man or a person of low status in a song. The law of defamation is, of course, about words. In Africa the word retains much power, whether in the form of witchcraft, or divination, oral history, or singing as a form of social control. Ethnicity is a real factor in African politics and African senses of identity. One hypothesis would be that the rules suit African society just as they presumably suit English society - or at least suit the litigating elite. One interesting African case comes from Rhodesia: after UDI but long before independence proper. In almost all Commonwealth African countries there has been the reality of the one-party state, whether de jure or not, and in many the experience of military rule - with the correlative absence of democracy in both.