Prophecy and the Pandemic: The Vindication of Decolonial Legal Critical Scholarship

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic offers the legal academy a special opportunity to reflect on various conceptual, ideational, and ideological questions that cleavage the academy and society. In this exposition, I embrace an exegetical-cum-legalist enunciation to analyse the material conditions that define the lives of the historically and presently colonised peoples of South Africa. In the main, this treatise advances two arguments: (1) that the present socio-economic conditions illustrate the decisive thrust of decolonial legal critical scholarship and its ability to predict the future; and (2) that critical approaches to the law constitute a legitimate intellectual prophetic engagement. I conclude by insisting that decolonial legal critical scholarship should be the cornerstone and a focal point of emphasis in the calls to shift [and decolonise] all facets of the law and its curriculum.