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Apartheid South Africa's segregated legal field: black lawyers and the Bantustans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Timothy Gibbs
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Abstract

The history of South Africa's urban-based ‘struggle lawyers’ – a trajectory epitomized by Nelson Mandela – is much discussed by historians and biographers, reflecting a broader vein of historiography that celebrates anti-colonial legal activism. However, it was South Africa's ‘Native Reserves’ and Bantustans that produced the majority of African lawyers for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, two-thirds of the African justices who have sat on the post-apartheid Constitutional Court either practised or trained in the Bantustans during the apartheid era. The purpose of this article is thus to reappraise South Africa's ‘legal field’ – the complex relationship between professional formation, elite reproduction and the exercise of political power – by tracing the ambiguous role played by the Native Reserves/Bantustans in shaping the African legal profession across the twentieth century. How did African lawyers, persistently marginalized by century-long patterns of exclusion, nevertheless construct an elite profession within the confines of segregation and apartheid? How might we link the histories of the Bantustans with the better-known ‘struggle historiography’ that emphasizes the role of political and legal activism in the cities? And what are the implications of South Africa's segregated history for debates about the ‘decolonization’ of the legal profession in the post-apartheid era?

Résumé

Résumé

L'histoire des « struggle lawyers » d'Afrique du Sud, juristes engagés urbains (une trajectoire dont Nelson Mandela est l'illustration parfaite), est l'objet de nombreuses discussions d'historiens et de biographes, reflétant une veine d'historiographie plus large qui vante l'activisme juridique anticolonial. Or, pendant une grande partie du vingtième siècle, la majorité des juristes africains étaient issus des « Native Reserves » et des bantoustans d'Afrique du Sud. En effet, les deux tiers des juges africains qui siégeaient à la Cour constitutionnelle post-apartheid avaient soit exercé, soit effectué leur formation, dans les bantoustans durant l'apartheid. L'objet de cet article est donc de réévaluer le « champ juridique » d'Afrique du Sud (la relation complexe entre la formation professionnelle, la reproduction des élites et l'exercice du pouvoir politique) en étudiant le rôle ambigu joué par les Native Reserves/bantoustans dans le façonnage de la profession juridique africaine tout au long du vingtième siècle. Comment les juristes africains, marginalisés de façon persistante par des schémas d'exclusion durant tout un siècle, ont-ils malgré tout construit une profession élitaire dans un cadre de ségrégation et d'apartheid ? Quels liens pourrions-nous faire entre les histoires des bantoustans et l’« historiographie de la lutte », mieux connue, qui souligne le rôle de l'activisme politique et juridique dans les villes ? Et quelles sont les implications de l'histoire ségrégée de l'Afrique du Sud pour les débats sur la « décolonisation » de la profession juridique dans l’ère post-apartheid ?

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 90 , Issue 2 , February 2020 , pp. 293 - 317
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2020

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