Epistemic Injustice: the Hermeneutical Marginalisation of Yoruba Legal Concepts in Nigerian Courts
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Nigerian courts routinely adjudicate Yoruba inheritance disputes using English legal categories that do not capture the concepts through which Yoruba people understand property, kinship, and obligation. Drawing on Miranda Fricker's (2007) theory of epistemic injustice, this article argues that Yoruba litigants suffer a distinctive form of hermeneutical marginalisation: they are denied the collective interpretive resources needed to render their customary experience intelligible within the formal apparatus of state law. Based on court observation, twenty-eight case files, and forty semi-structured interviews conducted in Oyo, Ogun, and Osun States between 2022 and 2025, the article demonstrates how foundational Yoruba concepts such as ile, idile, ori-o-jori, and omoluwabi are systematically untranslated, mistranslated, or dismissed as mere "custom" in judicial reasoning. The consequences are twofold. First, judges decide inheritance disputes without an adequate grasp of the social relations at stake, producing decisions that fracture lineage continuity and generate further litigation. Second, litigants - particularly women and younger heirs - internalise the belief that their law is not law, a form of testimonial withdrawal that compounds existing gender inequality. Although Nigerian courts formally recognise customary law under section 16 of the Evidence Act 2011, and although the equality guarantee in section 42(1) of the 1999 Constitution has been judicially activated in Ukeje v. Ukeje (2014), the article contends that recognition without conceptual understanding is an empty formalism. It concludes that epistemic justice requires three interlocking reforms: judicial training in Yoruba legal concepts, the routine admission of Yoruba expert witnesses, and judgments that retain and explain Yoruba terms rather than translating them away.
Author: ADEGBEMI ATANDA ADEWALE
Institution: Wesley University
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7220946504