Our law is constitutional law, and it has rights

Datos Bibliográficos

ID2290982
AutoresSindiso Mnisiweek (0000-0001-9937-0332, Legal Studies and Political Science University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst Massachusetts USA)
Año2024
Volumen47
Número2
Páginas234-243
Fecha de publicación2024-11-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1081-6976 • E-ISSN: 1555-2934
EditorialWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/plar.12587
OpenAlexW4404940629
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas23

Indigenous Southern Africans say that their laws are fundamentally grounded in the principle of Ubu-Ntu (humane-ness), but their communities are found empirically to often show the opposite of that law. Why is this? What is the law to which they lay claim to having? What are its roots and how can we reliably trace and know them? Reverting to the deep (i.e., unrecorded/unwritten precolonial) history of the Ntu, who make up the largest language group of Indigenous inhabitants of Sub-Saharan Africa, this article digs into the deep origins of Ntu identity and being. Based on evidence drawing simultaneously from the alter-Native intellectual roots of the Ntu and ethnographic findings on articulations of vernacular law in Nguni-speaking society in South Africa today, the article makes the decolonizing case that Indigenous law lays claim to having its own constitutional law (in which its peoples' social compact is grounded), with its very own conception of rights, that is wholly due (legal) recognition and respect in place of laws born of colonial logics

Human Rights and Development · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law in Society and Culture