Anti-colonial Lawyering, Postwar Human Rights, and Decolonization across Imperial Boundaries in Africa

Abstract

Focusing on the relationship between African political actors and their lawyers enables us to see the history of Africa's decolonization as an assemblage of legal processes through which a belief in universal democratic law — meaning law accessible to and in the service of everyone, including colonial subjects — nourished an awareness of the power of universally equal rights — meaning rights for all regardless of citizenship, economic or social status, degree of education, and religious, racial or cultural identity. In viewing the law as transformative with a potential to decolonize the structures of colonialism, Africans claimed their legal, political, and civil rights in the early years of decolonization. The alliance they formed with anti-colonialist lawyers forged the practice of claiming both individual rights and the collective right of the imperially governed to determine their political futures as equals. It was a practice that required a revolutionary transformation from the legally plural systems assigning variegated rights to the citizens and subjects of empires into political systems imagined to grant universal access to a more democratic law.