The jurisprudence of Steve Biko : a study in race law and power in the "afterlife" of colonial-apartheid

Abstract

This study contemplates the development of a South African critical race theory (CRT) with reference to the thought of Steve Biko. From a long view, the aim of this research is to bring the insights of the Black Radical Tradition to bear on the study of law and jurisprudence with particular focus on the problem of “post-­apartheid South Africa”. Working from the scene of the “afterlife” of colonial-­apartheid and situated at the intersection of critical race theory (CRT) and Black Consciousness (BC), this study aims to develop an alternative approach to law and jurisprudence that could respond to the persistence of race and racism as the deep and fundamental fault-­lines of post-­1994 South Africa. The transition to a “new” South Africa, undergirded by the discourses of human rights, nation-­building and reconciliation and underwritten by a liberal and Western constitution followed a path of change and transformation which has resulted in the reproduction of colonial-­apartheid power relations. Settler-­colonial white supremacy as both a structure of power and a symbolic order continues to determine, shape and organise the South African socio-­economic, cultural, political, psychic and juridical landscape. This foregoing problem has remained largely unthought in the South African legal academy and therefore this research takes up the task of recalling the thought, memory and politics of Steve Biko in search of a critical and liberatory perspective that could counter dominant theoretical and jurisprudential accounts of the past and present. The study therefore explores Biko’s historical interpretation of the South African reality and his theorisation of concepts such race, identity and liberation and retrieves these in order to critique and contest both post-­1994 law, society and jurisprudence as well as the faulty epistemological, historical, and ideological terms on which they are based. In the end, the study proposes to read Biko’s thought as standing in the guise of a jurisprudence of liberation or post-­conquest jurisprudence which unsettles the very foundations of “post”-­apartheid law and reason.