Whereas the reception and operation of English law in West and East Africa have been the subject of much study over the last few years, the introduction and application of Roman-Dutch law in Southern Africa (apart from South Africa itself) have received scant treatment.1 This article deals only with the position in Lesotho and attempts to show the extent to which Lesotho's legal system is tied to that of the Republic of South Africa, and thus strengthens the geographical and economic bonds which link the two countries.

In this paper, we shall not use the term “equity” in the technical sense it bears in the common law countries, where for historical reasons peculiar to England “equity” has come to denote a special body of rules for which there is no equivalent in Ethiopia. We give “equity” the straightforward meaning of a justice that is “natural”, that is, results from a conscientious judge's discretionary appreciation of what is fair in the circumstances of a case. Since appreciations of what is “fair” vary with the man on the bench, a necessary corollary of equity is incertitude of result.

The next chapter in the history of the Gold Coast and Nigerian marriage ordinances is encountered a few years later in documents concerning the law of marriage in Ceylon.2

On May, 30th, 1863, Governor MacCarthy wrote to the Duke of Newcastle, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, a lengthy despatch concerning the history of marriage in Ceylon and expressing his views on the need for a new ordinance.