I wrote this book because the ideas in it would not let me rest. They would wake me up at night, interrupt my work, and disorder my reflections. I got into the habit of writing these ideas in short notes on random pieces of paper and on my phone, just to get away from them. As academia in the Global North began to be more interested in ‘decolonisation’ as a term of art, I wrote about these ideas in my blog, in book chapters, and academic articles. None of these formats seemed to properly encompass the broad scope of how I wanted to explore the ways in which decolonisation relates to academic knowledge in law. And even here in this book, there is still more that I want to say.

I came to decolonisation, as a topic of study, before and within my study of law. As a cosmopolitan child of the ‘80s, I witnessed the global anti-apartheid movement. I read books written by writer–scholar–politicians who were pillars of the anticolonial and decolonisation movements across Africa from the ‘50s to the ‘80s. Some who trained as lawyers. So, from quite early on, the study and practice of law pointed me to its liberatory potential for ending continuing colonial logics as well as other global harms and injustices. So, I, like many others before and after me, came to the law school, because I heard freedom and justice and peace in its name. However, in time we all learn, though often not so explicitly, that the coloniser’s justice is not justice for the colonised. We learn that ‘the claim of the universal translatability of the English word “justice” … is an extraordinarily presumptive one’ (Gordon 2013: 70). We all learn that peace is not equally distributed. We all learn, eventually, that freedom for those racialised below the abyssal line is not the same for those racialised above it. We could suggest that legal education opens students’ eyes to the true nature of the law, especially when the focus of legal education is on black letter or doctrinal law.