Bringing decolonisation to law teaching: fulfilling the promise of legal pedagogy

I, like many others, came to the law school because I heard justice and freedom and peace in its name. For many, like me, the sojourn into the study of law is triggered by some event or situation. For me it was the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In April of 1994 nearly a million people were brutally murdered in that country. Yet, the international community was unwilling or unable to act, despite the fact that the killing was covered by international media. The hopelessness was overwhelming. And I wondered and hoped that the study of law would give me answers to how we stop endless suffering and devastation. This experience of coming to the law for hope is replicated across the world. For some, their triggering event is something happening far away to people they do not know and will never meet. For others, it is something more personal but no less earth-shattering. Something happening to them, a family member, or a friend—extreme poverty, domestic violence, alienation, police brutality, forced migration etc. Many people continue to come to the law school for answers. For me, like numerous others, the promises of the law school did not deliver exactly as expected. Especially for students who have experienced racism, students who are struggling to understand its persistence, students born into the shadow of empire, students for whom the imminence of environmental devastation is immediate and unyielding… decolonisation has provided some solace to their unfulfilled hopes.

What is decolonisation?

Decolonisation can be described as a collection of repudiatory and resistant responses to the multifaceted inauguration of colonial ways of thinking, being, and doing in the world—this inauguration is often dated to the fifteenth century. These colonial logics rely on unequal ways of thinking of the body, space, and time that have helped develop structures reliant on racism, classism, sexism, overexploitation, and xenophobia among others. As such, these systems of thought have helped produce, inter alia, racial injustice, extreme inequality, and environmental devastation, through the manufacture of race as a hierarchy of humanity, the kidnap and enslavement of African peoples, as well as the territorial commodification and occupation of land across the globe. Decolonisation describes a set of immediate and continuing responses developed by indigenous, racialised, and colonised peoples to resist these multifaceted methods of imperialism. These responses have come in different forms—independence demands, outright resistance, calls for sovereignty, and the restoration of lost knowledges etc. As such, we should understand that decolonisation is not one thing, but a set of context-dependent strategies, adopted by peoples resisting all forms of enduring colonisation—strategies specifically relevant to the particular ways in which colonial ideologies manifest themselves in those particular places. In other words, decolonisation, in practice, has often involved indigenous peoples, colonised peoples, racialised peoples, and their allies taking up the tools that they have, to resist the specific forms of oppression that they experience, in the places where they experience it, at the time they experience it. For them, decolonisation is a tool to make their futures possible, liveable, and flourishing.

Can we use this decolonisation in the Law School?

Decolonisation as I have described it here has had a long history—inside and outside the classroom. In our present context, the demand that #RhodesMustFall, which emerged at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in early 2015 and quickly spread across South Africa and beyond, found fertile ground with students and staff across the world grappling with the present manifestations of empire’s long shadow. Very often the fruits of this sprouted in law schools under the mandate “decolonise the law school.” These demands have also been taken up by many law teachers across the world as they seek to unpack the afterlives of colonialism in their work. For me, this has involved the design on a completely new unit, called “Law and Race.” In that unit, we use multidisciplinary methods to present a wide array of texts, music, films, histories, and knowledges to students to get them to reflect on how the history of colonialism has an impact on the nature of the law they study. In this unit, we consider various aspects of both the history of the British Empire and the role of law as means of attaining justice, as well as being complicit in producing the situations from which justice is being sought. We also consider what the students’ role is in the world as people who will soon be in a possession of a law degree. Threatened as we are by the dangers of racism, inequality, and environmental devastation, we unpack what they can do in response to these perils. I want my students to take a look at the history of law and the history of the world and to consider what this history means for how we understand the world and repair current harms. What does this look into the past and the present mean for the future? How do we as agents of law use decolonisation as a tool to make all our futures possible, liveable, and flourishing? My proposition is that we need to change the lens through which we understand the present, by looking to the past, so we can craft better futures for us all and for the earth upon which we at present just precariously survive. To survive at all, we need new ways of thinking, being and doing in the world—including in the classroom.

Where can decolonisation take us?

It is important to remember that decolonisation is not its own goal, but what we hope to achieve with it is. For ourselves and our students, decolonisation may provide us with the vocabulary and framework we need to develop tools to help us craft a discipline that will be able to rescue the planet from the perdition of racial injustice, extreme inequality, and environmental disaster. This challenge requires creativity, imagination, innovation, and courage. As such, I suggest that rather than asking formulaic questions like, “how do we decolonise the curriculum?”, we must ask more creative ones. For example: “What does it mean to dream of new anticolonial worlds from within the law school?” This prevents us from applying cosmetic changes to the curriculum with no real change to the structure and role of law schools or to the situations that bring our students to the law school. In this endeavour, we have a responsibility to use all the tools at our disposal to consider the ways in which our discipline can bring an end to the perils that continue to put our planet and all its inhabitants in jeopardy. This is a task that we can carry out now and hand over to our students—while we are still here. Survival is being threatened on a planetary scale through, among other things, the combined forces of global inequality, racial violence, and climate change. My hope is that our joint work on decolonisation and in innovative legal pedagogy will contribute to the fulfilment of those dreams.

_{Featured image by Giammarco Boscaro via Unsplash. Public Domain.}