Whilst internal legal pluralism occurs within official law and justice, community justice works outside the official domain. Although this field is quite vast in Mozambique, I will shortly describe two sub-fields: community courts and traditional authorities, both present in rural and urban settings. If, during the early years of Mozambique, a new attitude towards justice, revolutionary and popular, was experimented with in the form of popular courts, it was later on abandoned (Trindade, 2003). In the postcolonial period, the presence of a plurality of legal systems remains unrecognised by the formal court system. 



In fact, because the former constitution (1990) stated that “under no circumstances may the courts apply laws principles which are contrary [to it]”, community courts – the successors of popular courts – were disengaged from the official judicial system. Regarding the increasing pressure towards the recognition of traditional authorities, from 2000 on what we have seen is a process of choosing of local leadership by community residents. The recognition of local leadership (represented both as secretaries of neighbourhoods/villages or resilient traditional chiefs) by communities is to be legitimised by the state. Among the aspects that distinguish the practices of legal hybrids from those of official, codified law, we must refer to some essential aspects: while the first is normally consensual and seeks to avoid the escalation of situations of conflict, the second is based on the individual and seeks to resolve situations of dispute. 


This situation is associated with another important phenomenon: non-official justice does not operate in an individual way. Because it deals with a system that attempts to regulate and avoid problematic situations within a certain group, the authorities (either the régulo and his counsellors or the community court judges) cannot risk losing the support of their social base, the community. Hence, the prominent members of the community act as counsellors, and the population as evaluators, of the appropriateness of the final decision. This fact is, in our opinion, one of the ancillary characteristics of informal law.


 Because it is not codified according to written and more rigid principles, it is synonymous with a type of justice applied at the service of specific situations, where the circumstances and facts concretely determine the specific form of each resolution. Another important aspect is the fact that the former use predominantly local languages and codes of reference, while the latter apply a sophisticated legal language in Portuguese, exogenous and even more foreign to most of the population.


During the early revolutionary years, and while searching for a symbiosis of the progressive forms of the customary with more democratic principles of justice, some of the traditional practices were translated into newer institutions of popular justice, the people’s courts – working both in urban townships and rural settings. The postcolonial state knew that in order to be recognised as a legitimate authority, the new judicial structure had to be anchored, at least to some extent, in the everyday life of both rulers and subjects alike. 


People’s courts meted out a sort of popular justice, allowing, for example, for accusations of witchcraft to be brought to these courts. People’s courts were later on transformed into community courts – another embryonic form of hybrid justice, between the formal, official justice and common law (Gomes et al., 2003). A strong continuity is present between people’s courts and community courts. From the courts that have been under study, it is clear that most of them keep using the same facilities, and a staff of judges, from popular courts; thus, the community courts transformed themselves into highly complex hybrid institutions in which revolutionary, traditional and community political-legal cultures combined and in which, eventually, the only absent culture was the one which supposedly had become the official legal and political culture, the Western democratic culture. 


The community courts are part of the official law and justice, although the law defines them as operating outside the formal justice system,26 as a type of community justice for which increased study and value is proposed, bearing in mind the ethnic and cultural diversity of Mozambican society. The Preamble to Act 4/92 also states that the community courts have been created so that they can “enable citizens to resolve minor differences within the community, contribute towards harmonising the diverse practices of justice as well as enriching rules, uses and customs and lead towards a creative synthesis of Mozambican law”. They are, therefore, obviously concerned with cases of resolving litigation in which local, community and common law applies, or, in short, unofficial law. 


Hence, ancient practices were transformed into new forms of community justice, recognised as important both in rural and urban environments. By and large, community courts handle minor civil cases, such as the ones relating to a variety of family matters – including land disputes, housing issues, etc. (35%). This is followed by theft, debt, injuries, physical aggression and cases of witchcraft suspicion. With regard to criminal cases, they can handle only petty crimes that do not warrant imprisonment as a penalty. These courts are a space in which individual actors, through their interactions, produce shared meanings and common structures of domination and subordination. 


This is in opposition to the official judicial system, still dominated by judges who do not share the same moral universe as the people they act upon. Because community courts are not part of the formal judiciary, they are not supported either technically or materially by the district courts. Under these circumstances, our ongoing research has detected a wide variety of models for the way in which the community courts function. Lacking, in general, institutional support, and being part of a wide web of instances of conflict resolution (that sometimes complement each other, or, in other cases, compete among themselves) – ranging from the police and the local political cadres informally performing judicial functions, to the traditional authorities and religious organisations – the community courts rely on themselves and their skills for improvising, innovating and, in the end, reproducing themselves. 


Some remain very active, others are moribund; some beat the competition offered by other institutions involved in dispute resolution, while in others additional instances are called upon to assist the court in the decision process. Some are constantly involved in litigious cases, whilst in others community members rarely resort to them; some function within an official, formal atmosphere, whilst others assume an unofficial, informal character (Gomes et al., 2003). 


Some operate within a revolutionary logic, placing political loyalty above everything else, whilst others have fully internalised the new times and the pragmatism demanded by the needs of the community for peaceful survival; some seek to affirm their autonomy in relation to the local administrative authorities (for example, the local GDs’ secretaries, themselves an administrative hybrid), the religious authorities and the traditional authorities, whilst others are totally subordinate to the administrative authorities and assume a multicultural character, resorting to the traditional authorities in many cases, such as when dealing with witchcraft or family problems.