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

Abstract

AbstractThe 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?