The Courtroom as a Site of Epistemic Resistance: Mandela at Rivonia

Abstract

The 1963-64 trial of Nelson Mandela and other leading members of the liberation movement was a political trial par excellence. In the courtroom, the Apartheid government was trying the accused for the crime of sabotage but in the court of public opinion, it was using the event of the trial to produce images and ideas aimed at slandering and discrediting the African National Congress (ANC) and the movement for a free and democratic South Africa. The defendants, on their part, used their trial to denounce the racist policies of Apartheid and to outline their vision of a post-Apartheid society. In this article, I want to read Nelson Mandela's counterhistorical mobilization of lived experiences and memories of Africans -the scars, chains, the rage and Apartheid's unlivable juridical bind -as an act of epistemic resistance that re-opened epistemic battles and effected epistemic renegotiations. By submitting himself to the very law he denounces, strategically positioning himself at law's aporetic sites and moments -those most fragile frontiers that are so heavily policed from transformative interventions -he bears witness to Apartheid's rotten foundation. Drawing on modes of critique that are performative and genealogical, those that are possible within law's frameworks and categories, Mandela both obeys and defies the law, uses and critiques it, resists and claims authority, at the very site he is called to account for charges of sabotage. The article will show, how, by attending to contradictions, discursive dynamics, and points of tension, Mandela the accused creates conditions of possibility for forms of critique that register without being co-opted or domesticated by the discourse and the system it resists.

Left turn to legalism: fact-finding inquiries as political critique in 1970s India

“…This discomfort with the homogenising and universalising tendency of law has been articulated in various identity contexts. For instance, in South Africa, where legal strategies were extensively used to make various rights claims, it was noted that the courts and the state pursued a notion of the rule of law that is devoid of substantive elements of fairness and justice (Allo 2020;Wright and Chanock 2001;David and Le Roux 2019). An appeal to law for racial justice and civil rights often reduces this complex multi-dimensional structural injustice into a special interest issue (Bell 2008;Polletta 2000).…”

Reflections on South Africa's first Black Chief Justice, Ismail Mahomed

“…Apartheid law was predicated on the Westminster parliamentary system which reinforced the supremacy of parliament and which also embraced a myriad racially discriminatory laws, as well as a barrage of security laws. Pursuing legal victories based on rights were almost Sisyphean (Allo, 2020; Pitts, 1986).…”

Re-viewing Video Evidence and Police Violence in the Criminal Courts in Turkey

“…As he states, far from being a neutral deliberative process, the courtroom maintains the “irrepresentability of dissensus” in which certain political voices are bound to be unheard and delegitimized. Awol Allo (2015) sees the courtroom as a hegemonic space and underlines that different political subjects occupy unequal power positions in the process of meaning-making within the court's order of representation and the epistemic universe. Building on these accounts, I treat the trial of the police officers in Doğan's case as an instance by which political communities are differentially delineated.…”