Many African nations that were colonised never got a chance to pick their own cards from the deck. That alone would be difficult enough, but what happens when your opponent’s get to choose their hand and yours? It is one thing to be dealt bad cards. It is another thing entirely to have them selected for you, by someone who needed you to lose. These nations have lived under structures and systems that, while adapted over time, remain those original cards we never chose. This is the ink we did not spill, yet it runs through everything.
I did not encounter this as a theory. I grew up inside it.
Growing up in Malawi, the reality of living in what the Global North terms a “third-world country” wasn’t an abstract academic concept; it was my lived experience. It meant an intimate familiarity with the systemic and enduring hardships of a post-colonial state. My goal through this piece is to understand the system in its entirety, not just to critique it, but to discover what solutions I could bring going forward.
When I compare the UK and Malawi, I am always shocked by the massive contrast. While the UK certainly faces its own modern crises, its advanced infrastructure, integrated transportation networks, and massive economic institutions look nothing like the landscape of Malawi. Which has forced me to ask a difficult, uncomfortable question: if independence was our ultimate victory, why is the former metropole thriving while the post-colonial state still searches for its footing?
Looking closer at these legal foundations reveals a darker, historical truth: legal systems are frequently weaponised as tools of classism, engineered to keep the marginalised firmly in place.
This concept of “legal appropriation” is not new. It spans centuries, echoing back to Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas and forcing Indigenous populations to sign legal agreements written in languages they could not comprehend. From its very origin, the Western legal tradition has been used to conquer, strip sovereignty, and cripple developing nations. Yet, paradoxically, the law is also the unique instrument we must use to restore equity, protect human rights, and claim true independence.
The legal system dictates the health of the economy, and the economy reshapes the boundaries of the law. They are entirely inseparable. In this piece, I will trace this relationship by exploring the Malawian and Ghanaian legal and economic landscape before and after independence, highlighting the pressing modern legal battles that demand our focus.
The Colonial Collision
When the British arrived in Malawi in 1859, officially establishing the British Central Africa Protectorate in 1891, two conflicting legal worlds collided. What was initially indigenous stewardship and cash crop concessions becoming British customary land policies that completely erased an already established system run by chiefdoms and their respective values. Because written historical research on African law prior to British influence remains scarce, modern lawyers are often left to piece together narratives, relying heavily on archaeologists and historians to reconstruct how justice was once delivered.
The colonial administration operated under the paternalistic belief that they were bringing order and justice, saving Malawians from “barbaric” ways, a Eurocentric saviour complex famously echoed in literary works like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness[1]. This colonial shift had a profound reaction post-independence. As legal scholar Martin Chanock highlights, early parliamentary debates in independent Malawi revealed a fierce desire to reject English legal norms and return to “traditional laws.” But by that point, the laws had already been written.[2]
In Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, this colonial collision played out through a strategy of selective legal recognition. Where the British viewed regions as having little immediate commercial value, such as Northern Ghana, they dismissed local governance entirely, labelling populations as decentralised “savages” to justify seizing land control under statutory declarations like the Mineral Rights Ordinance of 1904. Yet in resource-rich cocoa and gold hubs, the colonial administration took a different approach: they partially recognised customary land rights and backed local chiefs, using that very recognition as leverage to secure foreign mining concessions and cash crop supply chains.[3]
While Malawi faced a heavy-handed, sweeping dismissal, because colonial powers viewed it as offering little global leverage, Ghana’s vast material wealth forced the metropole to negotiate. This dynamic allowed Ghana a degree of commercial agency, but it was an agency orchestrated to serve foreign capital, establishing a historical precedent of “strategic compliance” that still dictates how both nations engage with the global economy today.
The Blueprint That Remains
As Princela highlighted in her piece, “The Jurisprudence of Capital: Why Western Market Models Fail in African Realities,” [4]these historical legal blueprints continue to trap African economies today. Whether looking at Ghana’s performance of fiscal compliance to satisfy international creditors, or Malawi’s collapse under structural debt and monocultural export dependencies, both nations are ultimately judged by a jurisprudence they did not write.
Post-colonial trauma is not the sole author of Africa’s current economic challenges, but the inherited legal blueprint remains the primary anchor slowing structural transformation. Compliance with an extractive legal architecture will never yield true economic sovereignty.
This institutional performance is precisely what Nthanda Manduwi exposes in Beggars in Suits[5], detailing how elite development actors professionalise dependence through polished suits, policy language, and managed respectability. Her work illuminates the core tragedy of the post-colonial legal and economic landscape: we have become fluent in the manners of power, learning to ask beautifully within rooms whose rules we still do not control. The difference, you could say, is that Ghana wears the suit better.
The Game Is Not Over
All of this is to say that we each carry legal systems that show up differently today, but the deeper issue is that they are all rooted in rules that were never written to benefit us. The absence of clearly documented pre-colonial legal traditions means we cannot simply reach backward and reclaim what was erased. The world has moved, and romanticising what came before will not move it back.
But decoding is not the same as dismantling. What we can do, what we must do, is rewrite the code from the inside. True independence cannot live only in a flag or a date on a calendar. It has to find its way into the legal architecture that governs land, trade, debt, and sovereignty. That is where the real work is.
We may not have chosen these cards. The ink may already have been spilled. But some spills become the most unexpected works of art, and cards chosen against you can still be won over with calculation, precision, patience, and an unrelenting desire to change the game entirely.
Stay tuned.
[1] Conrad, J. (1990). Heart of darkness. Dover Publications. (Original work published 1899)
[2] Chanock, M. (1978). Neo-traditionalism and the customary law in Malawi. The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 10(16), 80–91. https://doi.org/10.1080/07329113.1978.10756245
[3] Bening, R. B. (1995). Land policy and administration in Northern Ghana 1898–1976. Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, 16(2), 227–266.
[4] Kudom, P. (2026). The jurisprudence of capital: Why Western market models fail in African realities. The Continental Docket. https://thecontinentaldocket.com
[5] Manduwi, N. (2026). Beggars in suits. Bien Books Publishing.
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