It was July 1979 and we were in a small village in northern Mozambique, 1500 km from the capital. In the background I could hear viva's being shouted and drums being beaten but my excitement was of another kind, the cool excitement of an English-trained legal empiricist about to discover facts, in this case, not only facts, but virgin documentary facts. Because right in front of me on the table in the shade of a large cashew tree, lay a big book with heavy binding, and in that book lay the first judgments of one of the first Popular Tribunals to be created in the first revolutionary country in Southern Africa. I had already sat in on the lectures given at the Law Faculty to the young law students who were to constitute small brigades to start what was called the implantation of Popular Justice. I had heard from veterans of the armed struggle for national liberation how the basic principles of this system had evolved in the Liberated Zones even before Independence; how Popular Justice meant justice that was popular in form, in that its language was open and accessible; popular in its functioning, in that its proceedings were based essentially on active community participation; and popular in its substance, in that judges drawn directly from the people were to give judgment in interests of the people.