Udeakpu Eze V. Samuel Igiliegbe & Ors (1952)

LawGlobal Hub Judgment Report – West African Court of Appeal

Real property—Communal tenure in customary law—Onus to prove that one section only of a town is owner.

The plaintiffs below claimed an account of rents suing on behalf of two quarters and alleging that the land belonged to the people of the town as a whole, which the defendant denied.

The plaintiffs proved that the land belonged as they alleged and that the whole town used to grant land to strangers and that the rents had been collected for the community as a whole, until recently, when defendant cut out the plaintiffs. The defendant alleged that each quarter had its own land and denied that his section had ever shared rents with the plaintiffs.

The trial Judge accepted the evidence for the plaintiffs but not that for the defendant; he also postulated that land belongs to a community; and he gave judgment for the plaintiffs.

The defendant appealed, and his argument was that his section could hold in common the major part of the land in dispute but it was impossible for the whole town to hold land in common—that there was no community of the town but each quarter was a community.

Held

It was right to presume as matter of customary law that the land belonged to the community as a whole; the onus was on the defendant to establish that his section had a title to the exclusion of the community as a whole but he failed.

Appeal dismissed.