Professor David Higham describes his experience of teaching in East Africa with the International Lawyers Project

‘It’s blackboard and chalk; and bring your own chalk.’ With those words, the briefing meeting at Norton Rose’s riverside offices started. For a dyed-in the-wool PowerPoint® trainer like me, this was going to be a challenge.

I had been invited to join a team of practising lawyers and trainers to deliver a course in advocacy and civil procedure for the Law School of Tanzania. The project was organised and sponsored by the International Lawyers Project. ILP was set up by a number of present and former partners of Clifford Chance, and it operates in association with International Senior Lawyers Project of the USA. It has set up a register of practising and retired lawyers, who are willing in principle to participate in projects which interest them and for which they have relevant experience. This particular project is run by Tim Soutar.

Our team had a good mix of talent. Barrister Anne Brown of 3 Pump Court Chambers and solicitor-advocate Lynton Orret of Freemans are both practising advocates. Richard Butler and I are both litigators and advocates-turned-trainers.

Our purpose was to add something to the Tanzanian equivalent of the Legal Practice Course. Our students, like all Tanzanian lawyers, had completed their LLB. Most of them had studied at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, where we were teaching. They then undertake a practical legal training course that lasts for an academic year. I talked to Goodluck Chuwa, a lawyer in practice, who joined us on the course, about the old path to admission. After the course they found jobs as legal officers in law firms such as Goodluck’s, to gain experience. They might also have taken a six-month internship with the Attorney-General’s department, assisting magistrates and judges. They would then aspire to a six-month pupillage within their law firms. Finally, with a satisfactory pupillage report and what must have be a terrifying interview with two senior advocates, the Dean of the College of Law and the Attorney-General, they would have been admitted to practice.

This system is changing. They will now be admitted on completion of the Legal Practice Course.

I talked to our host Dr Gerald Ndika, Dean of the Law School, about the practical legal course. It covers practical subjects, for example civil procedure and conveyancing, but remains primarily classroom based. There are some practical exercises. Students apparently say that it covers some of the ground they have already dealt with in the LLB. What Dr Ndika wanted from us was a greater emphasis on learning by doing. Our course was part of a wider project to assist the Law School in making their course a better practical preparation for practice. It was quite a challenge, but I think we succeeded.

We had about 85 students. Richard and I are used to a tutor to delegate ratio of about one to six, rather than one to 20. We started in a classroom with all the delegates. Our usual teaching method is to deliver short lectures to get across some of the techniques that we were then going to practice. Our students were used to learning by taking verbatim notes of full lectures. We had to slow down. Luckily the almost-forgotten skill of writing on the blackboard helped and pretty soon, both we and the students realised that the only notes were going to be bullet points and, most usefully, diagrams.

We were joined for some lectures by local practitioners and by Judge Hon Buxton D Chipeta. Judge Chipeta is the author of Civil Procedure in Tanzania - A Student’s Guide, which became our bible for working out the, mercifully, minor differences between English and Tanzanian procedure. Judge Chipeta had a tremendous rapport with the students and did not trouble himself with notes or the blackboard. Like us, he delivered his talks in English. Unlike us, he occasionally broke into Swahili for, we suspected, some leg-pulling at our expense. We learnt from him and adapted as we went along.

Once free of the classroom, we were able to work on practical exercises with groups of about 20. This involved a walk through the University campus, which at first glance looked like the English countryside though, on second look, the birdsong and leaf texture did not quite match. Our group rooms were in a light and airy modern block. Here we had desks and chairs that we could move round so that people could work in small groups. We could also set the room up as a courtroom for the last day of the course. Stone floors and bare walls made speaking hard work both for us and the students. Here we had no blackboard but we did have a flip chart.

In groups, we could start breaking down barriers. Our students slowly learned that we were not called sir, and that we expected to be challenged and questioned. They quickly picked up that we were not going to feed them the answers but rather to set them the task, for example, to prepare an opening speech, and then it was up to them how they did it. It was hard to be sure whether language was a problem. The language of the courts in Tanzania is English and all our students spoke good English. Dr Ndika told me that the students were used to hearing English spoken with an English accent. For our part, we needed to tune in to Tanzanian English and the quiet voices of our students. Many of them were absorbing information from us in English, processing it in Swahili and then rendering their performances in English again.

There was room for misunderstanding and loss of meaning across cultures. We and they made it work. They could be great fun and there was plenty of laughter. For a mediation exercise, Anne Brown needed to divide her group into ‘husband and wife’ pairs. Luckily her group had about equal numbers of men and women, but her suggestion that the ‘husbands’ should choose their ‘wives’ met with a riot of protest from the women and the policy was quickly reversed.

This sort of training is tough for students. They all have to perform, whether advocacy, negotiation or mediation. They have a natural fear of failing in front of peers and friends. Performances were hesitant at first. Tanzanian voices seem naturally soft and unassertive. Added to this was the uncertainty about what was expected of them. We got over this by dividing our groups into small teams of three or four to work together. We encouraged students to rehearse with us face-to-face. This allowed us to give individual feedback and build confidence. It was also very good to see the students who worked out early on what was needed, helping others. Being collegiate came naturally to our students.

While we may have felt deprived without laptops and projectors, our students were well used to making do with what they had got. The favoured notebook was an out-of-date desk diary. One lunchtime, we visited the University bookshop. It brought home the mountain students have to climb. There were no new books for sale; just well worn second-hand textbooks.

Although our students varied in ability, they all had received a sound legal education. It was particularly good to see their grasp of the ethics of being a lawyer. A number of them are going on to England to study for a Master of Laws degree.

Our hosts looked after us well. The campus is dotted with small open-air cafés. Here we ate the best of the local food. Goat with ugali, a starchy maize staple and chicken soup were firm favourites. Our minder, David, taught us the art of eating with the fingers of one hand. Mind you, we must have looked like bumbling city types as we pointed at and photographed the monkeys and monitor lizard that joined us for lunch.

In the original plan, we had allowed plenty of time for each stage of the programme and had reckoned that we could not get the students to a mock trial by the end of the second week. Once we and they had got to grips with learning by doing, we made faster progress. We were able to rewrite the programme and every student was able to contribute to a mock trial of the case study on the last day.

It helped that defendants give an opening speech in Tanzanian procedure. This meant that both sides had to formulate their case and state it succinctly in five minutes. The main advantage was that conducting a trial, however short, gave the students a terrific boost to their confidence. It was also a challenge for us to deliver a slightly different judgment on the conclusion of each case. I have to say that judges do not usually get the sort of audience reaction that we were subjected to.

I talked to Dr Ndika about the reaction to our style of teaching. They had found our practical and demanding approach surprising at first, but they had liked it.

I was to fly home on the evening of the last day, so our last dinner as a group of four tutors was on the Thursday. We found an Indian restaurant on the Bogamoya Road leading out of Dar-es-Salaam. As we dined under palm trees and the stars of the southern sky in the restaurant's walled garden, we all agreed that the experience of teaching in Tanzania had been richly rewarding. We would all go back, if asked. After all, as one of our mature students, intriguingly a former government minister told me, ‘When you give knowledge away, you do not lose any of it.’

David Higham LLM is visiting professor of litigation management at Nottingham Law School

Further information