Family property among the Yoruba

“The land is family land—he may not sell it”; “the land is our family land—it does not belong to the chiefs”. How often such statements are heard in West African courts and how difficult it is to distinguish the rights claimed by the individual, the family and the community. To resolve this difficulty is the task which Dr. G. B. A. Coker has set himself in his recently published book Family Property among the Yorubas.2 In this contribution to the rapidly growing number of books on African law the author writes of a single people—the Yoruba of Western Nigeria, and of a single topic—family property; this is no light task, for the study of the concept of family property is the study of the social and political structure of the people as expressed in their land tenure.