Sinopse: The links and connections between State and traditional legal systems in Angola and Mozambique have not been widely studied, although they constitute matters of great momentum. for state building in each of these countries. The papers collected here are an attempt to fill in some of that gap, by charting many of the main issues - touching upon matters both theoretical and empirical - raised by often uneasy and highly contested modes of articulation. From different, albeit complementary, angles, all papers focus on some of the legal and political problems encountered and the negotiations as well as the solutions generated for the management of what in many cases amounts to potentially threatening forms of pluralism. Preface The study of legal pluralism - like its close relative, anthropology -is an academic discipline that was born out of the encounter between Europe and the countries that it was eventually to colonise. Yet, contrary to what many people may wrongly suppose, this does not mean that the study of legal pluralism ceased to be useful when former colonics became independent. On the contrary, many of the analytical techniques and some of the knowledge generated by the experience of colonialism are these days more useful than ever. The colonial period, it transpires, was not a brief aberration in between periods of relative normality. It was a phase in a much longer story of action and interaction between societies geographically far removed from one another. The legacy of colonial times is still relevant to our understanding of the world for a number of reasons. Above all, it is now clear that in some former European colonies, particularly in Africa, the nationalist ambition of building powerful bureaucratic stales to govern model nations has not been fulfilled. Contemplation of the social and political reality that has emerged since the golden age of nationalism allows us to discern aspects of postcolonial societies that bear an obvious resemblance to[...]
