Ten years after: the law of marriage act of 1971 and its implementation at primary court level a field study

This field research intended to provide a feed-back, after ten years of enactment of the law of Marriage Act, 1971, of Tanzania, whether and how far this reform legislation was implemented at the Primary Court level (Chapter I). As point of departure I examined (from Primary Court files over a period of ten years) what degree of compliance rules of divorce and divorce effects have found. The result was that because of the compromises in the drafting of provisions it was possible that almost all the traditional patterns could be accommodated without defying the law. (Chapter II). On the basis of these findings, whether the goals of the legislator to promote social change in the behavioural patterns has been discussed: this is, on the one hand, the structure of the nuclear family promoting personal and economic equality between the spouses and conferring and individual status to the child (Chapter III). It was, on the other hand, the political aim of a uniform law to be a means to integrate different factions of the population and to aim at a more homogenious development at national level (Chapter IV). In the Evaluation (Chapter V) the obstacles and necessary efforts to obtain firstly, a higher degree of compliance, but, secondly, also the implementation of the far- reaching goals of the Law of Marriage Act are discussed.