DODOO v. GYANSA AND ANOTHER
1960
HIGH COURT
GHANA
CORAM
- ADUMUA-BOSSMAN
- J
Areas of Law
- Property and Real Estate Law
1960
HIGH COURT
GHANA
CORAM
AI Generated Summary
This case revolves around a land ownership dispute where the trial court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, whose mother allegedly purchased the land for £4. The first defendant claimed he bought the land for £10. The court dismissed the appeal by the defendants, affirming the plaintiff's ownership based on various pieces of evidence including testimony from disinterested boundary owners and acts of possession and control over the property.
JUDGMENT OF ADUMUA- BOSSMAN J.
(His Lordship referred to the facts and continued).
It seems to me that proof of the ownership of the land need not be restricted to the evidence of the vendor or to that of eye-witnesses at the sale. It is the exception rather than the rule that, at the time of litigation about land which has been transferred by methods of customary transfer, the original owner and vendor (and the witnesses to the transaction) are alive to tell the tale. In my experience, it is evidence (if such be available) of the exercise of acts of ownership over the property during the material years, which has served as a beacon-light to guide the courts in determining ownership.
So in United Products Ltd. v. Afari and Others (Div. Ct. 1929-31, p. 12) Deane, C.J. said:
"The probabilities of the case and the evidence of possession strongly support the claimant's story and I do not consider that the fact that she has not called an eye-witness who was present when the gift was made is ipso facto sufficient to defeat her case and that in fine a gift cannot be proved as contended unless a witness to it is produced.
“In the case of Basel Mission Factory v. Suapim a judgment of Smyly, Chief Justice, reported in Local reports of 1919 page 14, is not in my opinion an authority as contended for the proposition that in order to prove a gift before a Court an eye-witness of the transaction must give evidence of the gift; all that the learned Chief Justice does there is to state the well-known principle of law, namely, that for a gift to be valid it must be made in presence of a witness, in other words a man could not be heard to say that a gift had been made to him by a donor secretly, without a witness. The proving of a gift before the Court must in my opinion be proved as any other fact is proved and when a person who alleges a gift made in the presence of a witness does not call that witness that is a fact that merits most serious consideration but when the other circumstances in the case all most strongly support the allegation and are in fact only explicable on the basis of the allegation being true the Court is I conceive quite entitled to come to the conclusion that the allegation is proved."
Again, in the case of Ebu v. Ababio (2 W.A.L.R. 55) a case which was considered by the Privy Council in 1956, the headnote reads as follows: ¾
“This was an action fought between two stools for a declaration of [p.11] title to an area of land. The traditional e