Legal Practitioners and Intercommunity Boundary Litigations in Colonial Southwestern Nigeria: A Perspective Analysis

For a very long time, the Colonial judiciary in Nigeria did not permit legal representation in land boundary cases in Yorubaland and in the whole of Southwestern Nigeria. The reasons for this were diverse, but one basic reason was the colonial government's anxiety about the political stability of the colonial estate if lawyers were given free hand to operate in West Africa. However, legal practitioners soon found their way around the embargo by filing their applications for transfer of cases under Section 25 1 (c) of the Native Courts Ordinance 1933. The present work is an interrogation of the activities of legal practitioners in this class of cases so as to showcase the gains or otherwise of lawyers appearance for their clients in land boundary cases. Data for the work were essentially judgments delivered in this class of case, colonial government papers deposited in National Archives, Ibadan Nigeria and private papers. The data are analysed through the use of historical method where varying documents are confronted with each other to beat down subjectivity and bring out a historically objective view. Findings revealed that lawyers were facilitators of the arms of equity in land boundary cases.