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- Title
Indigenisation and Africanisation of Legal Education: Advantaging Legal Pluralism in South Africa.
- Authors
Ruffin, Fayth
- Abstract
This conceptual paper navigates a way to 'indigenise' law school curriculum to disrupt the centralist legal mind and advance access to justice for all. Literature insufficiently shows how to design and implement curriculum and assessment practice in the decolonisation project. Innovatively drawing upon South African legal pluralism to highlight curriculum development beyond borders, the paper distinguishes decolonisation, indigenisation and Africanisation and shows their interactivity through the gaze of African ontoepistemologies, axiologies and cosmologies. Through discourse analysis, interpretivism and experientialism grounding, I argue that failure to Africanise legal education perpetuates a justice deficit in breach of the South African Constitution. The paper concludes that hegemonic privileging of rule of law orthodoxy diminishes usefulness of both non-state community-based justice systems and customary justice systems despite widespread use of the latter two systems. Recommendations include use of 'cultural interface' and 'critical standpoints' (Nakata 2007: 7; Carey & Prince 2010: 207) to generate inclusive strategic law school curriculum development. Assessment practice should involve socio-legal research through indigenous methodologies with findings used to advance epistemic freedom in a transdisciplinary way to spur further curriculum transformation. This can facilitate professional development opportunities for judges and lawyers to allow living African law to develop within its socio-cultural environment and the Bill of Rights.
- Subjects
SOUTH Africa; LEGAL education; LEGAL pluralism; CAREER development; CURRICULUM planning; LAW schools; DECOLONIZATION
- Publication
Alternation, 2019, Vol 27, p111
- ISSN
1023-1757
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.29086/2519-5476/2019/sp27a5