Time in Law. 
Legal memory banks / cotemporality in land law

Project period: 2022-2026

Why does customary law persist in African land governance? This project tests a counter-hypothesis: customary law survives not because states are weak, but because it remains embedded in people’s legal memories. These remembrances function as “legal memory banks”, sustaining the logic of earlier legal orders alongside contemporary statutory regimes. Feukeu conceptualizes this coexistence as cotemporality. Drawing on African philosophies of time and selected strands of complexity theory, the project examines how temporal layers of law are reproduced through everyday practices of landholding and inheritance. This approach reframes the land question in Africa as a problem of temporal governance rather than institutional failure. Understanding cotemporality clarifies why harmonization and legal suppression often fail, and it opens new pathways for designing reforms that align with people’s lived legal temporalities. The project ultimately links legal time to broader issues of economic opportunity, shifts in power relations, and ecological uncertainty.

Literature

Kwamou E. Feukeu, The future of land law is not customary, but is political: the diversity of value creation systems behind land, in: Anthony Diala, Jan Erk (eds.), Handbook of Traditional Law and Governance, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).