Ephrahim v. Pastory (1990) — Tanzania's High Court Ruling Against Customary Law Barring Women's Land Inheritance

Holaria Pastory inherited clan land from her father under a valid will and sold it to a buyer outside her clan. Her nephew, Bernard Ephrahim, sued to void the sale, arguing that under Haya customary law — followed in Tanzania's Kagera Region — women have no power to sell clan land, only to hold and use it.
In its 1990 ruling, the High Court of Tanzania, per Justice Mwalusanya, held that the customary rule barring women from disposing of clan land was discriminatory and void: it conflicted with Article 13(4) of the Tanzanian Constitution's equality guarantee, and with Tanzania's obligations under CEDAW, the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, and the ICCPR. It was among the first African court decisions to apply international human-rights treaties directly to strike down a discriminatory customary-law rule.
The ruling remains a frequently cited precedent in African gender-and-law scholarship, but its practical reach has been limited: as a High Court decision it did not bind other High Court judges, and legal scholarship on Tanzanian inheritance law — including the widely cited Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law article "Inheritance Law in Tanzania: The Impoverishment of Widows and Daughters" — documents that subsequent courts have ruled inconsistently, and that customary-law restrictions on women's land and inheritance rights persist in much of rural Tanzania more than three decades later.

Read the full analysis: https://www.law.cornell.edu/women-and-justice/court/high_court_of_tanzania