Histories of Black Lawyers in South Africa: from Colonialism and Apartheid to Globalisation

In recent years, in parallel to a rising interest in the globalization of the contemporary legal profession, there has been a mini-boom of SouthAfrican based scholarship debating the participation of black legal professionals in the construction of the legal and social order.  This history is replete with paradox. On the one hand, law has been a central instrument of settler colonialism. Legal statutes expropriated land and guaranteed settler property rights, safeguarding the huge investments that flowed into mines, railways, and ports from the late-nineteenth century onwards. Likewise, the architecture of racial segregation that reached deeply into society was enforced by the full weight of the judiciary, the police, andthe prisons. On the other hand, because the South African state was founded on a deep legal culture, the law could also be used as a sword and shield to defend (black) rights against the oppressive (white) state. Many leading South African political activists have practiced as lawyers, including the founders of the African National Congress (ANC, est. 1912) and the Natal Indian Congress (est. 1894). Famously, Nelson Mandela associated his name with the universal quest for human freedoms: as a lawyer defending Africans inapartheid’s segregated court system in the 1950s; as a prisoner of conscience on Robben Island in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; and as a lawyer-statesman in the constitutional negotiations that framed South Africa’s democratic transition. This special issue reveals how studying the sociolegal order of South Africa is an interesting and important way of thinking through wider trajectories of settler colonialism and segregation and the entangled legacies of law, race, class and gender.

Site de la revue : https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rshj20/77/2