 Good morning and good afternoon everybody from whatever parts of the world you might find yourself in Hello, I'm a Brina I'm Brina Manji. Welcome Welcome this Mike and Also, welcome Maria from the University of Cape Town as well as the Dr. Zubike from Elorin It has been a bit of struggle for me getting online this morning. Yes wasted my 30 minutes, but thank God for trials So good morning all and good morning to our participants as well Thank you for joining us and for sharing your time with us today And so our session is going to start with me introducing all our participants The main ones at least the ones who are going to be the panelist and then we'll get into the discussion Related to the topic that we have today then at the end I'll leave a session for Our participants outside the panel to to be able to ask a few questions and get some responses from the main panel So I'm going to start with introducing The main panel itself is a very powerful panel Specifically representing Colleagues we've worked on law in Africa both from the southern African perspective From the eastern African perspective, Western African perspective and the United Kingdom as well And so we are going to have an interesting session today. I want to start by introducing Professor Ambrina Manji Who is I Can not yet see her here. I'm not sure if she's managed to join But Professor Ambrina Manji, even if she joins us later or is here someone I can see her is a professor of land law and developments As well as the director of the Center for Global Law and Justice at the University of Cardiff. Welcome Professor Manji Thank you for being here and Importantly, she's the former director of the former director of the British Institute for Eastern and Southern Africa and she ran programs They are in Nairobi for a period of four years and from what I hear she's still involved there So it's to be good to have her here today in this session. I also want to introduce Professor Dismicle With the professor of public law at the University of Cape Town and she's the director with Yana Jeffers on the Center for Law and Society, which is also situated within the faculty of law at the University of Cape Town She's also the NRF's chair, such a chair Insecurity and Justice at the University of Cape Town Dr. Azubike Onuroguno is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law and Department of Jurisprudence and International Law at the University of Loreen in Nigeria And Dr. Tinenenji Banda is a senior lecturer in law in the and the faculty of law Specifically the Department of Private Law at the University of Zambia and she's a former Associate Dean for undergraduate studies But importantly, she's also the head of legal the legal division for the South African Institute of Quality and Research in Lusaka, Zambia Lastly and importantly, our practitioner is the project director for the African Legal Information Institute at the Democracy and Governance Research Units of the University of Cape Town Ms. Maria Badeva Bright And so welcome to this particular session. I hope it's going to be interesting If I've not introduced myself, I'm the chair for this session. My name is Dr. Azubike Onuroguno Based in the Faculty of Law at well, it's called the Department of Law School of Law And at the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London And before that I've worked in Eastern South Africa Former Student at the University of Cape Town as well. And so This is the topic that is interesting to me as much as it is of Interest to all of the participants and panelists. Thank you for being here And so perhaps to start to start on this discussion I found something interesting which I feel will set the theme for the discussion we have. I read a book by Nangela Nyambola. It was a very interesting book. It had a lot of steam around centers for African Studies in Cambridge at Soyes somewhere around 2018 if I'm not mistaken. It was a book on digital democracy and analog politics specifically looking at the the internet era and its influence on transforming politics in Kenya. And somehow in the acknowledgement session of Nangela's book is this particular statement. She says that it takes a village to complete a project of this depth and breadth referring to the book she had worked on and that she was especially grateful to a e-village that believed in her and the particular project. But she goes on and all quotes that research anywhere is difficult and it's a difficult process but especially so in a developing country and outside the bounds of a bricks and mortar institution. And she puts in brackets we need open access now. The painful process of trying to make this project happen has reified my belief that to truly decolonize the university and the academy we must work on access to knowledge. I would like to thank everyone who sent journal articles, carried books in their luggage or sent e-books to my e-reader. So I specifically refer to that note and that acknowledgement because I feel it coaches the discussion that we are having today. Nangela has been educated in Europe and the United States in Birmingham and Harvard both in African studies and in law. And so in writing this book she was already placed in a position to first of all access information. She already had a e-village, the likes of Oreo Coro and everybody else she quotes in their acknowledgement. And so she does not even reflect the average person who would be writing on this particular area. But if she highlights these other issues then there are even much so for average people and average scholars working within the African context trying to research on this area. But also for students who are maybe not based in Africa but they're based in other parts of the world also trying to research and work on this area or study or for scholars who are trying to teach this particular part of the legal discipline or knowledge in general. And so I think the highlights she points out can be reflected in the discussion we are having today. They essentially embody the discussion we are having today. And so perhaps to start off with our discussion I would like to set out a question to all of you about what decolonizing access to and legal knowledge means to you. What is what does decolonizing access to knowledge or decolonizing legal knowledge mean for you as legal academics or scholars or practitioners of open access? I'll start with Professor Manji and then we'll move on to Professor Smythe and we'll move on to Maria then Doctor Banda and then eventually Doctor Zubike. Professor Manji. Thank you very much Olivia and thank you for all of your work and that of your colleagues to bring us together. Obviously we would all like very much to be in a room together but this is this this is what we have to to do for now and it's it's great to see so much interest in the in the event. Let me start just by saying a little bit about my background because it's the context by which I come to some of the broad ideas I want to touch on today. So the first thing to say is I'm a Kenyan legal academic based in the UK but I come very much out of a kind of a critical law and development stable so I was lucky enough many years ago now to be a student of of Issa Shivji and anybody who has been taught by Issa or been in a room with him will know that it's transformative to to be taught by him. First of all unsettling and then transformative because Issa and the teachers who I was exposed to at that time is when I was studying at Warwick in the North School there the teachers method was really to break you down completely to break down any of the assumptions with which you'd come to your legal studies and then to build you back up from there as a as a group and there was something I think really transformative about that time and about that way of teaching and it's a model of teaching on which I've I've tracked this. I then spent some time in them on the campus in Dar es Salaam and then at Makarere very early in my career and again those things really shape the way that you you think about your your legal research and about your practice as an academic and my my research has always been reasonably wide so I write on land law reform as the kind of main body of work that I do but I've also written widely on on legal education and particularly the history of legal education in Eastern Africa. I've written on on law and literature so I have an ongoing interest in literary studies and literature and on women in the law and when I ran the BIA in Nairobi one of the great jewels of that institute was that it was so multidisciplinary that on any given day you could be meeting people from across all the social science and humanities disciplines so I've always felt confident to dip in and out of those those various disciplines. That's important background I think because it tells me a little bit about how I came to some of the more recent work I've been doing which is in relation really to the politics of knowledge production and and the politics of the dissemination of knowledge and how how we might confront just how inequitable our current structures of knowledge production and dissemination are. So one reaction by me has been simply a personal one it's never going to change any structures but it's an important one to to do which is that I've become a bit of a kind of guerrilla emailer in the sense that if anyone wants to drop me an email and say you know there's an article behind a paywall here could you send it to me we have access to our own institutional databases which are very rich and it takes me all of 30 seconds to download a PDF and send it onto a colleague it's never hard for me to do and I always you know we always joke with with each other this is our kind of small paywall teeny kind of movement you know it's not going to change the world but it's what you what you can do and if anyone is listening whoever wants any materials it's very welcome to DM or to write and I'll do that for them but that doesn't really deal with the structural problems with which we're confronted which is the work that the paywall does and the work that these inequitable systems of knowledge production and dissemination do is that they they make many of us simply the subjects always of knowledge rather than not knowledge producers and makers in our own right and so what we are confronted with is is the eurocentric ways of understanding the world and the kind of accretion over many many years of these eurocentric ways of seeing the world which are not just frankly boring and narrow but also that actually have important effects they they they cause epistemic violence they they cause the marginalization of certain ways of thinking and wanting to be in the world but they also and this is from the point of view of lawyers they also are the dominant ways of seeing the world by policy makers and lawmakers when it comes to time to think about for example legislative change so and I see this a lot in my work on on land that the dominant approach to land has been one that has been framed and made elsewhere than the continent and the marginalized voices on land so those who think about land or who want to write about and those who might think about land in a different way are the marginal voices I'm thinking here the Kenyan scholar or goth agenda whose work I think should be absolutely at the center of our curricula but who actually is a kind of us until recently a marginalized and lone voice on in his scholarship on the African commons so how do we chisel away at that accretion of often male dominated Eurocentric knowledge and how do we contest and challenge that knowledge and I think that's that's the for me though those are the kind of important questions of the moment and I've been thinking a lot about how gatekeeping works so it's not just that gatekeeping goes on because we know that but the really interesting question is how do we work out the the mechanisms by which gatekeeping goes on divine fool who many of you will know is recently written about how publishing is an act of violence and I think what he means by that is that the process of writing and putting our ideas forward and trying to get those ideas out into the world often entails a kind of epistemic violence and an attempt by others to try and hem hem in our ideas and the effect that they have so I've been increasingly interested in how ideas have been expunged from lawmaking and particularly from African lawmaking in relation to land and this this seems to be to occur across a range of disciplines I was at a seminar recently which just in in passing someone very prominent with a lot a lot of influence referred to Kenyan elections as never having really been driven by ideas and it was lucky we were on zoom because otherwise I would have really I felt like I wanted to reach in and punch them because it seemed to me it was such I it was such an it was such a impoverished way of thinking about Kenyan politics and our history and and and it reminded me of conversations I've had for example with Grace Mozilla who many of you will know is the Kenyan literary scholar which we've talked a lot about how we need to write intellectual histories and how we need to think more about the history of ideas in relation to to our countries and it seems to me that we've lost touch with the the core the histories at the at the core of for example our law schools and our legal education so I've been very interested in the cusp what I call the cusp colonial years the period just after independence when African new African law schools were founded and thinking about you know what it is what it is that in that period the main drivers and and promoters of legal education wanted to achieve so i'm thinking here someone like karmic rumah and garner or even yere re in relation to students on dark campus what were they thinking like what what were the intellectual drivers of that period and so you know unlike now the the lawyers didn't sit separately from the political scientists and the historians if you read about Dar es Salaam in those years if you read intellectuals on the hill by Issa Shivji you'll see they taught they thought together they socialized together they they taught their courses together and often that was driven by students it's interesting to think of that now when we when we watch our young people leading our movements that young people students were leading student protest movements in Nairobi and in Dar es Salaam saying this is not how we want our curriculum to work you know go away and think about this again and it seems to me that we we have to reconnect with that history if we're going to do anything to challenge this way of thinking about about for example Kenyan elections so to say Kenyan elections are not driven by ideas is simply to buy into this this model of our elections as you know just one event after another just one damn thing after another no no devoid of context devoid of intellectual momentum so and and unable to see that actually these these events elections are driven by ideas in between it's much harder to do that work it's much easier to say oh well you know this election was simply about this mobilization of this ethnic bloc etc if you want to write more deeply about our politics and our law you need to think about how ideas have been contested and about counter movements and about hello it seems we have lost abrina there and while she is trying to get herself together again i want to give this opportunity i'm not sure if i had essentially highlighted the way um the discussion should go but i feel from my discussion i can easily move to professor dis meet his discussion because it brings in the south african context and the whole point of the fees platform and and the curriculum must change and the work that is actually being done at the university of cape town within the the law and society center but as well as within the rest of the law faculty abrina we've just and of course of course on the internet okay yes we'll come back here of course okay all right um so uh yeah let me let me let me move on then um from where abrina was at um so i come to this topic um very much through an engagement with my own positionality as someone who um grew up in south africa who went to law school for the first time um sort of in the last gasps of um of apartheid um didn't find any engagement at law school with the politics of law and what law was doing in this in in this country and the violence that law was doing in this country um and so i left uh and eventually went went uh uh you know went went back to um to study law but always very aware of the the politics um um of law and most of my work um centers around violence um and um have legal engagements with violence but also the violence um of law um and i'm particularly interested in uh in criminal law and the uses of criminal law and the abuses of of of criminal law um and the kinds of institutions that um that it enables and legitimates and um and supports over time um but i'm also kind of an insider outsider to the world of law and society which is really my my sort of uh academic um home so again having studied um uh in south africa and then having studied um for quite some time at at stanford um which is which makes me an insider um and if you study in south africa and you and you and you're living in south africa and you're living in in africa then i feel like you're a perpetual outsider to um too much of um too much of this kind of academic um um world um and and to be positioned in that way means that you experience multiple professional exclusions um and so even when you're kind of trying to um to do those things that scholars in the global north um do it is just that much more difficult it's that much more difficult because of uh data costs is that much more difficult because of flight costs is that much more difficult because of just our horrible exchange rates um it's that much more difficult because of the kinds of things that ambrino is talking about because actually there's a level at which this world just doesn't exist beyond being uh an interesting case study um and so you know for me i've been very much kind of in in engaged with that um uh positionality so being at stanford um i uh i thought this is a this is a place at which uh i'm going to find some level of engagement with um uh with africa and there was just none i mean i was amazed having access to all of those databases behind those paywalls actually how little there really was um all of those books that purported to be international takes on xyz or global takes on xyz and i would open them up and i page through and i try and find that even just the one little chapter on africa and it wouldn't even be there there would be no um even uh excuse really given for i mean it's not like you would find um a little gloss on africa just it was just absent it was just not there um and so i started having these conversations with people about you know why don't you have africa in your global book uh and the pushback on that was always well we couldn't find anything we couldn't find anything we couldn't find any wine um and so i became quite obsessed with finding those things and finding those those ones right so kind of putting all of that together and i i didn't really um i mean i thought that was a relatively easy job actually um until i started putting together um a course outline for a course that i taught on law and society in africa um and i was very clear from the start that this was going to be a course that was centered on the work of african scholars it was going to be a course from africa uh about africa um and um and i rarely struggled to find these materials that i thought would just again kind of be there you know that my commitment to to to doing this would just um just make it so um and so i did a sort of a survey of um all of the leading law and society journals so the law and society review um uh the journal social legal studies the arti social legal series canadian so and so um and all of there were three thousand and twelve um articles that i looked at starting from 1964 through to 2017 um and the reality that confronted me was really stark um there were um fewer than two percent of all of the authors who'd published over that time were african scholars whether from the continent or in the diaspora um abrina i think you published two of those maybe more and and fewer than three percent of them even mentioned africa so and then there were big chunks of time when there was just nothing published like a decade in which there would be absolutely nothing that even mentioned africa so when i say mentioned africa that would be an article for example that dealt with um amnesty's um and it would talk about northern island and i would talk about chile and i would sort of mention south africa or good things but you know nothing actually um uh substantive so there was the paucity of material on africa and then there was the narrowness of it that was really really striking um so this was scholarship that focused on uh violence ethnic violence uh genocide the kind of sequelae of um uh trc's were were were big for a period of time um gender-based violence um marriage but also not really kind of so always exoticized right so so this is about sororists and leverists and um uh you know uh widow marriages and and and things like that um in fact i mean interestingly i think the most downloaded article i haven't checked recently but the most downloaded article on law and society review deals with the organ trade in kairo um you know africa folk first one and it's like there are not that many people who are interested in the organ trade in kairo right it's just it's one of those you know you write an article about fgm and you're going to uh you're going to get cited so it's those kinds of um those kinds of articles um and then hiv so it's really sort of it's sex violence disease um that features really um highly and what you don't see is um and i think this is this is this is almost as important as what is there so what is there tells a story about africa but what isn't there also um tells a story in its absence and what you don't get with that is the theory building so you really do get africa as a case study africa as a case study for these really exotic um kind of topics um that are very african in uh you know some kind of exotic conception of of africa but what you don't get is the stories about not the stories really the articles that are about institutions about the profession that accretion of knowledge over time that embryona was talking about the accretion that builds theory um over time because there's there's this pushback to african scholars of you know don't do the case studies do the the theory work but theory work is done in conversation over time these built understandings it's not something that we do kind of just you know individually um um on our own so that steady flow of scholarship um the the theory building about practices and so on that that has um very much for me being absent from um uh from the scholarship um and so i think what that means is in part and this is so just to perhaps say that one of the things that um um that we've done is um so i i i teach this course on african law and society um and i'm very proud of the fact that out of 54 readings 50 of them are written by african scholars um most of them drawn from the african continent and that's really important for me because um because i i i think that they're um that kind of inside or outside of differential access is really um uh important so um so i have this course but also last year um i was able to bring to cape town a group of fabulous um scholars um who actually taught a course on law and society in in um in africa and we had a workshop following that um uh on teaching law and society in africa um and i'm being erased this point there about um you know about looking back these into the about intellectual histories um and uh and following that i try to get a copy of the dais along debate um and it was sort of late and i have this one click thing on amazon and uh so i i kind of went on amazon and i found this copy and i was just about to press the button and i realized oh my goodness it's 895 u.s dollars it's not 895 rand um and so and therein lies another problem so it's not just you know it's not just the the kind of the contemporary work and the contemporary access but it's also how expensive some of these materials um are and so i've been asking this questions about where the intellectual property rights lie in these materials and is it just that they haven't been republished uh right you know it's um is somebody actually getting you know any kinds of royalties from them i don't think so um so so we don't have access to those materials because they're so so so expensive um and so inaccessible um and nobody's actually uh nobody's actually benefiting in any way um from them so yeah that was an interesting discussion from um professor smith and it really ties closely into the discussion that um professor manji just gave us um going back to um the the the the the the little session i had at the beginning that when we talk about access and decolonizing we are talking about the means of teaching the means of researching the means of transferring this information um and the limitations that are found within all those particular means and it's it's particularly interesting to hear that there's actually already work being done but it's being done in silos and it still has limitations i know that abrina and and and and and and um d are already working together and finding ways they are forward but then would like to move this forward and that the two of them are probably professors at a level of engagement that um has taken a long period of time and they've built their scholarship program period of time i also want to hear from those scholars essentially who have studied within the african continent or outside it are working and teaching um at at legal um institutions on the african continent um whose research also has been transnational whether it's from human rights in africa applied human rights human rights and development um and just to hear their views and i'm sure they were viewed into what the two of you've been discussing um i'm going to start with um dr banda and then i'll go to dr zubike uh dr banda you've worked both uh you've worked in africa you've been educated outside africa just just hear your experiences both in terms of getting that particular education but coming back and working within the african context and also working at the center of policy and research thanks olivia so um thank you so much to soas and uct to you the chair and to my colleagues for this platform i'd like to tie your so i was educated both on the continent and outside the continent i'd like to tie your last question to the first question that you asked which is what decolonization means so these are just my thoughts based on the helplessness that i felt um as a as a researcher as a student of law first and foremost as a researcher now as a teacher of law so decolonization to me as a starting point would be no longer being a research entrepreneur so what you described in that first coat of having to beg for access to payrolls having to yes that entrepreneurial spirit that we know so well is to do any kind of work particularly in the context where i work i can't just sit at my desk and start to do research my students can't do that secondly is freedom from this tyranny of the conceptual framework so d talked about theory building and all that but your i remember being a phd student and having to frame my intervention within these existing conceptual frameworks so that again um for me decolonization would mean freedom to create to actually create conceptual frameworks no longer not being able to give access to my own work okay even if i i publish something i can't give access i can't give access to my own work and ideas and it's incredibly frustrating yeah so it's ownership it's control it's the time and space to create i mean i i in the context of of a resort stretched higher education system for example where i work where you're teaching so many students um you're teaching so many classes that that freedom and space just isn't there so when we talk about decolonization it has to start there and also as they say also as they say something is repeated long enough people tend to believe it well what is out there in the zambian context the the law that is out there the law that is curated is the law that stems from the colonial era that is what is available it's not that indigenous law isn't being made it's that it's not available so what we read what we teach is basically that is what's available it's a colonial law so for me those are just some some starting points based on my own experiences having to beg for access to these exclusionary spaces right without the ability to create one's own space yeah and perhaps if i may follow up just for your case is there been a difference in experience between for instance when you're doing your phd outside the continent and accessing information there as opposed to now being able to access information when you're on the continent for you to write and by difference i mean could you find the the information the exact information you needed for the context you wanted to write when you were there um or even when you're in places like the way deal was talking even when you're in places in the worst where you could actually access the information perhaps maybe it was not the the kind of information that you'd have wanted to access and so you find that perhaps your limitations while you are outside the continent are similar to the limitations while you're within it's just framed in a different manner yeah so uh what d said totally resonated with me that was my experience as well um i was struck about when i when i i went to graduate school what struck me was how much information there was so there were all these libraries all of these resources physical and digital and even within that context of so much information there was still not enough information or not the type of information that i was looking for the other thing that struck me is i could find old newspapers zambian newspapers in these libraries that i know i would never be able to find at home so there was a contradiction of they had um sort of part of our history that i could never access here on zambian soil i could access in america newspapers going back 30 40 years that that always stays with me i mean i was amazed to see the times of zambia the daily mail um all of these bulletins curated um so i think that the challenges were different but also the same um you're able to access information but if it's not useful information then you're almost back where you you started from thank you very much dr bandur um dr zubique you have been educated primarily um within the african context but you've also worked within southern africa western africa and the u.s um what have been your experiences so far with their all concept of accessing knowledge or limitations in accessing it specifically legal knowledge um and also how has those influences somehow found their way into your legal scholarship as a student but later on um as an academic thank you olivia um let me also thank so has and uh you see t for this wonderful opportunity i want to also thank one of my great mentors this means thank you for the impact you had so coming into this this discussion i i treat what sparked my interest in this area basically as a law scholar i started uh when i came in contact with the african human rights mood court competition uh when i represented my university in that salam now the discourse was on customary law and it bordered around about gender issues so it sparked my interest going forward i became privileged to be a candidate for the human rights and democratization masters in pretoria which i did in 2008 so here i became exposed to international law and human rights issues getting in to do a phd at some point after i started teaching i remember writing what i felt was a very great conceptual framework for human rights when i was doing my research and i gave it to my supervisor professor michelohansson gule and after he read it he called me we sat down in his office and he was like what does rights mean in your village and i looked at prof here i am i have looked at dembo i had looked at all the scholars that had talked about rights and everything donnelly and all of them and here is professor hansson gule asking me what does it mean in your village so this sparked another line of interest in me during my field work i had to interact with people in my localities in the three major ethnic groups in nigeria to understand did we have any team hold rights and from proverbs from folk laws and all of that i was able to come up with that understanding that yes we had an african perspective to some distance but what was happening we were not in the literature we were not available that became a source of challenge and and worry then at that point i came in contact with law and society association so when i attended my first law and society association it was a massive conference it was so busy we tried to look for african scholars we tried to look for people who could take us on the next level and in this i met quite a number of african scholars i met the downies of this world i met the obiura or kafos on this world and we started exchanging and with the great work d you know she's been on in cape town trying to mentor a number of african scholars i remember coming now coming home and trying to bring this into my teachings trying to get my students to begin to appreciate from a law and society perspective what here is the basic challenge within the university like bandar was saying that i feel there is a pull and push factor that is happening to us when i wrote my first book development and the right to education in africa wonderfully published by palgrave macmillan i see it out there on the internet but my students can't buy it they can't assess it but why if i had an option to publish in nigeria would i definitely my answer would be no and why would i say no now when we come to our grading and appraisal systems in the universities at least for nigeria i know you have settings calls for what is called local publication and you have settings calls for what is called national publications and you have settings calls for what is called almighty international publications and everybody the more international publications you have the better you are the better scholar you are said to be so i look at my CV today and i was telling somebody a few days ago oh i think i've really changed myself i don't have national publications i have to begin to think of publishing with nigerian journals all the publications are international because that is the the the stamp we need to show that we are scholars so is that push and pull factor and how do we get around curing these deficiencies in our systems currently all the universities for you to be promoted you need to have your articles published in skimago and all of that and i've taken my time to search through where are african journals in skimago i look at i find only one law journal in skimago and then what are we talking of then the next steps it's i need to begin to think of the us force i need to begin to think of the kenbridge so again the same push factor what is then happening to us a few days ago i've been reading uh understanding africanness by chasenguena and and it opens up my thinking to a whole lot of the things we are doing to ourselves are we still in search for an identity what says that a journal published at university of in lorry nigeria doesn't have the same sufficient quantity as a journal published elsewhere in the world so these are the things that that we need to begin to really think about and i think like i said i always refer to d again i remember we were in kairu two years ago discussing these issues and bringing african scholars and on my part we've tried to there is um an international research collaboration of the law and society association that i privileged to be one of the coordinators and we have about hundreds scholars from about 20 african countries trying to pull ourselves together encourage ourselves together and do all of that that is one way but coming to the teaching again i try as much as i can to use the works of these scholars that i am now in touch with for i i teach a particular course in my university called law and social change so i try to rely on some african scholars and some african materials and through these networks you could email someone and say please oh i saw this article do you have a draft of it can you send it to me then you give it to the students and you try to engage them on that so that is also a way of trying to build this but you also find that where you now come with this ideology that haven't been exposed or you've gone for a fellowship in us good hall law school you're coming home you've been exposed to a whole of a whole lot of features and you're trying to bring this down to your student suspicion sets in so there is always a lash back cultural lash back religious lash back so trying to so i find the the process of trying to unlearn the minds also a bit challenging because you're not now coming with african scholars who are challenging these norms you're coming with european scholars who have challenged these norms then it is labeled oh no you're coming from canada uh no you south africans you must just leave us so it also has a way of pushing back on the impact you try to have but i think all in all i would say we have more work to do we need to keep the network stronger we need to build more on what we have and maybe begin to rethink the validations that we seek in our africanness thank you thank you doctor that has been interesting and i pick unlearning there unlearning is a difficult process for people who have been learning about a certain way of approaching things for the longest time and this unlearning is not just for the scholars it's it's it's for our students it's it's it's for the systems themselves and the structures and so um it will probably take longer but i'm happy with the fact that there are already things on the ground that um essentially pushing this idea forward whether it's in how we are teaching whether it's in how we are doing our research and conducting it whether it's in the collaborations that we are already setting up um and so i want to introduce the the the the the aspects to this particular discussion that is practical that is we keep asking ourselves how how do we do this how do we push it forward but there are also people who are already trying to do this and push it forward whether it's promoting more access whether it's essentially um ensuring that access is open and for that matter i would like to introduce and at least bring into the discussion um it's maria but ever bright from the university of capeton to enlighten us on how she feels about this or discussion about related to decolonizing and opening up access questioning what knowledge is is questioning what access knowledge is but also doing something about it essentially maria yeah thank you olivia and uh thanks to all the panelists that preceded me in fact you've covered most of the things that i would have mentioned anyway so i've had to readjust my thoughts and in the interest of time i know we are pressured right now for that i will shorten what they're meant to say um so i just to introduce where i'm coming from i lead the continental effort called african legal information institute which capacitates open access legal publishers at the moment in uh 15 african countries all together we are about 16 such organizations from sub-saharan africa um i personally started and got involved in this back in 2003 2004 at that time with the southern african legal information institute which was the first one on the continent dealing with uh the most functional in fact uh in an entry banders zambia lee was the first one uh all together on the continent to start publishing uh free law um but sadly was the first one at the time in south africa it was functional and operational um so uh a lot from and across the continent because i have been traveling and in the efforts of setting up these leads um i should mention we started back in 2004 with about 500 documents of legal judgments and legislation from south africa uh we are sitting today with about 300 000 digitized documents of primary law which is judgments and now we are pressing ahead with with legislation only effort in this area i think i should mention here the vetoria university legal press which has been tremendous in um providing access to scholarly materials and in fact they should be part of these further conversations uh on this topic um and this is where we are going in uh now as these is we are looking at ways of supplementing our primary law um so scholarly material level for users of legal information in africa you know integrated search engine where they could find all african law um we are working with praetoria university press in fact they contacted us last year to set up a mechanism whereby we would be able to federate search into their material um so this is this is where you know my background is sort of where our efforts as african lee as part of university of cape town are at making this information more accessible but i'd like to just highlight a few points so you can perhaps take into discussion uh from our learnings of uh you know these 15 years of free access to law to primary material and the first one is that it was mentioned by professor manji um earlier on is access to this information in practice influence ideas and the development of law on our content so um tater for african law which also looked at so emory law but i think that that can be extrapolated the learnings can be extrapolated onto scholarly literature quite easily as well so we looked at how can i just tell who they say it was quite interesting to see that you know from an NP cover primarily uh anglophone jurisdictions it was quite interesting to see that instead of citing each other um they cite more and more judges from uh they cite english cases decide canadian cases they cite basically cases that are available so it is quite unfortunate that many many years after um independence uh you know that the thinking is still not decolonized in that way we are still reliant on law that is not being built in africa and then it was quite interesting to go into judicia for example or south africa where you can see an entirely different trend where judges are even even without citation system judges are increasingly finding ways to cite each other so we can clearly see how even 10 years of access or free access to law has shaped the way some countries that have implemented it properly has shaped the way that they engage with the law so this is the first uh and in fact i mean we have plenty of anecdotes you know from the fact that uh back in 2007 we had the Ugandan judge who later on helped us start Ugandan coming in saying well we want to have our own leave because you know we cite your south african judgments just because they're available on the internet and it's just that much easier to actually be able to utilize those so this is the first point i mean how does dissemination actually affect access secondly who are the users and currently the lesion africa collectively uh attract about 450 000 users per month our scholars not all of them are judges not all of them are uh legal professionals there is a huge number of people that are your average internet people you know that have some sort of an interaction with the law that they're seeking for an explanation of the law and you know it's it's quite telling for me for for me as a person with a legal background to actually see somebody who has not been educated with the law and i think everybody knows that but we have confirmation through the feedback that we're receiving that law is quite is continues to be quite the close discipline so while you would see you know similar similar should i call them difficult uh subject areas like medicine for example people engage with medical information a lot with a lot more ease because it is a lot more digested and made available and commented than it is with law and you see here in african enough many african countries in particular it is a problem people cannot find a lot that is explained to them and they obviously struggle with interpreting judgements legislation and so on so that's another area that i think we need to um we need to as a as a scholars in law we need to we need to assess is there an avenue for us to make law more popular you know beyond our scholarly community um and then finally i want to uh sort of pin on the discussion board here the valid ability of materials where are the archives of african legal material and i'm still on that journey of digitizing primary law and it was quite interesting to hear dr bander earlier talking about you know the lusaka times being available in digital format while she was studying in Cornell but not available here and it's quite and it's it and it's striking i mean i was in i was in the united states last year in november and i um happened to be uh happened to be at the conference of the african section of the american libraries all together and it happened because i was actually having a meeting there with someone um and there is this huge archive of african legal material that is already digitized we are looking to obtain to be able to you know in particular the z to be able to compile registration collections for africa that is sitting in in america that is available to americans and to legal scholars in america in fact all scholars in in those universities that is not available to us in africa here within africa at the university of cape town we have a collection of african material sitting in our government publication section that is not available to my colleagues in zambia for example um and this needs to be this needs to be addressed interestingly when i raised the questions to the african library section in the in the states they said well we are not too sure that we should give you that because you know there are issues around decolonization that we need to speak about that's a well precisely you know we need to have access to those and they need to be given to african governments and to african universities to curate to to to collate and curate uh going forward because that is our legal history and i think um on that note i would like to leave these three questions open for discussion including from the from the audience thank you all right um thank you very much maria um you essentially have tied up this discussion presenting for us where where would want to go in the future both in terms of making african law primary and secondary um as well as african legal scholarship much more um um accessible but also we have shown us that you know we don't have to start and and i think that was the point of this webinar that we don't have to start um from zero um they're already uh system set in place and they're already working people working in different areas that could essentially come together but also there's already material out there because the point of this discussion is twofold one to essentially push for more african scholarly publications good quality publications to push and support more african journals um specifically legal journals to be actively accessible but also push for quality publications within those journals and to find african legal scholarship that is already out there that is really good and this takes me back to abrina's discussion whether we're talking at isha shivji's writing we're talking about um koti kamangas at the university of daislam whether we are talking about um john barolo in namibia if we are talking about jo lo ka onyango in in in mackerelle all these are essentially african scholars who have digital who have archives archives of information that would essentially allow us to push forward this discussion and give us context and so we don't have to start from scratch it's a matter of being able to make this information accessible and also be able to create future scholarship out of this currently information that already is in existence and so it's not like we are starting from zero and that's why the digitization the bringing this information to a place where it's accessible becomes important and perhaps as um a way of tying up this discussion what would each one of you want to see going forward for for law has researched applied and factors within africa individually but also as a group what would you want to come out of this because we essentially set this up as a clarion call to move this forward and bring those silos together so i'm going to again start with abrina and then we'll work our way down thank you olivia so so i think i would what i would like to see is really um detailed work to support the initiatives that we've been hearing about and there are a few also being mentioned on the chat and in the uh in the discussion amongst the panel but amongst the audience so there are initiatives that we should be supporting and they range all the way from the production of excellent textbooks for example in there will be i'm thinking here of textbooks on constitutional law land law thinking of strathmore university press for example um we should be supporting those initiatives we should be supporting our journals and we should be really having the difficult conversations about what do you mean by excellence and i think we have to have that conversation also at the level of institutions why do you only expect to promote people if they publish in international journals what is your benchmark for what international is and why do you police the boundaries of what you call excellence so uh in in this way but also i think we have a responsibility for those of us who are not living on the continent to to challenge that on our part and to say you know my scholarship also needs to be and will be published on the continent those of my interlocutors i am not interested in uh publishing my work in uk law journals where as d said they're a little bit of an exotic case study we also have a responsibility to think about where we publish our work who we want our readership to be and where where we want to build our readership and where we encourage our phd students to publish their work i think in that regard you can have such an enormous impact as a phd supervisor for example and as somebody who's in conversation with early career scholars support the really excellent initiatives that are going on on the continent and and by doing so break down this idea of excellence which is used as a form of gate gatekeeping so i talked about that at the beginning that it's not just the gatekeeping happens it's the the language and the discourse and the mechanisms by which gatekeeping happens and one of those is to release this boundary of what we think of as excellence so i think i'd like at the level of individuals but also the level of institutions for us to be having some of those really difficult conversations about where we choose to publish our work yes yes yes thank you thank you thank you abrina um next is d can you follow up on what abrina said with her share in the comments yeah um so i think i i think absolutely i think those are those are great points about how we support local and and and regional journals i think also to to point out that um that editors of many international journals are very keen to have african scholars publishing and sometimes we self-select art right so it's also about having confidence that we have something to say um that we have something to say that can be part of a global conversation um building networks of people who can support that writing um so whether it's through the um the kind of writing workshops that the center for law and society and that i'm brina's center cardiff have been um organizing um and i think that those things those kinds of initiatives need to really be layered um so i think we have to be careful about just having kind of one-shot interventions i think we need to work really hard at building uh communities of writers and readers um that can support each other's um um work i'm very worried about open access to me honestly because i i what i'm seeing at the moment is that people who come from the wealthiest uh institutions are able to buy open access so it's almost like greenwashing it's sort of open access washing um the scholarship and and um so so far i'm not really seeing it benefiting um africa other than making you know scandinavian scholarship accessible to to african scholars so you know i'm really excited to be part of something that is generally thinking about how we use that to democratize uh knowledge um and then just quickly what we've done at the um at the center for law and society is um we've built a database with the uct library um that puts our materials that we're so we're building a repository it puts our materials into the uct library and makes them accessible in that way but is also entirely um open access and um so we've spent the last year and a bit since the workshop that we had in cape town working with our digital library services to build that um uh back end and right now we should be doing a data sprint data marathon i think they call it um and putting all of the those materials um into the system but since we're all locked down that's been a bit difficult um but you know that's really kind of doing more of the intellectual well the the collecting of the intellectual history um so uh we've been very fortunate to receive materials from uh professor rick abill at ucla we had a lot of um sorry sorry about um so we had a lot of um uh east african and west african materials that he collected over sort of a lifetime of our research uh professor sondra berman's materials and so we're kind of slowly working to digitize um uh those and out of that we're hoping through an international research collaborative with the law and society association to develop a critical reader on african law and society um so that's just some of the work that that that we're doing at um at cls okay um thank you very much d um perhaps onora what would you um as a big onora what would you want to see going forward with this discussion um how would you like things to be done as we move from here what sort of collaborations and networks would you like to see coming out of your personal initiatives but also as a group moving forward okay um i think onora has frozen a beat i'm going to move to tin energy um how would you like to move forward um oh are you back yes okay okay yes yes yes how would you like the future to look when we talk about law in africa um both scholarship but as well as accessing um hard law primary and secondary law for instance yeah i think it's a great work that is going on from the initiative uh maria uh shared it's a good one uh she also mentioned the work hope is doing so uh in in the first place i think um we need to rework our institutions are we working our institutions to require us i think um brenna said something that i picked yes we agree that as african scholars we move out into the diaspora space to get a little bit more empowered we shouldn't forget to pull up then where we where we were and where we are coming from so we need that institutional support sometimes when i see my phd students i shake my head they don't have the same opportunities i had as a phd student in south africa i had opportunity to attend conferences and i share with them i some of these conferences i never had to go to anybody's office all i needed to do was to do an abstract the abstract was accepted and then you mail the the director and say oh you're excited and something comes up you're you're supported you have flight tickets but how many of my phd students here have such supports then what am i expecting from them and it comes to what way you talked about quality olivia i i i smiled because quality yes i had i agree on the base name of quality but really quality i think we should also put that in invited comments talking about gatekeepers i've reviewed an article for a journal and my response was a no no and by the time i saw the full uh journal out i saw that same article without much changes you know so that that that is an aspect that we need to look at and the research space we create for our african scholars we need to build it up we need more what we are doing is fine i have talked about the the irc initiative that is plugged into the law and society association i've talked about the work li is doing with african society in africa and all of that so a whole lot of these initiatives are the issues that we really need to to come together around and encourage can only encourage you can only motivate i remember asking one of my phd students i said look i can't supervise you for three years and we don't have an article we must do an article it's not a requirement for him to graduate so i'm beginning to think do we make it a requirement in our in our curriculum so but for him i also see him struggling there is no access we've talked about access already so these libraries are not even available for these students to get so it's a whole lot of struggle so you now find a student needing to push his economics first they're needing to push his scholarship while some of us that were opportuned to be away from the continent we didn't have any of those worries so you could see the disparity that could always come in the output that will come up with so i think basically institutional access and institutional repositioning for our research space is really important and we are doing great i think we started somewhere okay thank you very much thank you thank you thank you um uh zubike and perhaps um tin energy before we get to maria at the end um where would you like um the young african scholar the university of zambia to be positioned um what systems um do you see uh do you foresee all your ideal systems going forward for a good environment for research as well as teaching within african institutions um that would not only promote african scholars but also the students that the scholars um are learning from so just two small points at the very local level based on my work with zambia lee our students need access first and foremost to their own primary resource and legal resources and one thing that an opportunity that i think we could take is courting the gatekeepers so in our context those are the judges um that are not releasing judgments or even lawyers we found sometimes when there's an important case that we can get access to going to the lawyers that argued the case is how we get access to that case and put it online but what we're finding and maria will bear me witness to this is some of our our biggest users are the gatekeepers so it's interesting on our contact feedback form we have lawyers coming and saying hey could you find me the case that i argued a few years ago and we know that judges are also very heavy users for instance of zambia lee so courting those gatekeepers and and you know making them realize that if they withhold that information 10 20 years down the line they'll be in need of it as maria said also judges not being able to access other judges because that information is actually not there what's there the law reports from the 70s you had a whole blackout of law reporting in the 80s and 90s so those cases can't be cited you know so it's lost history in that sense that's the first thing the second thing is so open access in our context when we think of open access we have to think we have to go even a step um one step behind and talk about the nuts and bolts of even things like internet penetration for instance so even if we have open access i mean 90 percent of our users on zambia lee are in lasakha which is the capital i'm a bit sad we didn't get to talk about the covid situation because if you talk about deepening inequality in terms of we are allegedly allegedly doing e-learning but really on the ground um you realize that basic issues of internet access inhibit learning even if hypothetically all the materials were available online so we shouldn't forget that element that there's not the nuts and bolts of open access starts with actually having access to reliable internet connection i'm happy my own connection has survived um that's far but you know i even struggle in that regard so um yeah i think that's that's where i would end thank you thank you to nana and you thank you for highlighting um the the the limitations not both in both in the the content that we are talking about but you know how that content can essentially be accessed and taking us back to the question of internet and i actually had wanted to associate the discussion on the colonization with the discussion on the current context of lockdown because when we are talking about inequalities um then they've they've essentially been highlighted by by the lockdown and and you see the students in certain parts of the world being able to go on and learn online and access information and students in other parts of the world as well as their lecturers not being able to to go on teaching and therefore their lot would probably would have to repeat a year and this brings in probably the importance of this discussion for the current affairs both the context of black lives matter and the discussion of the african person and african law and access to information and knowledge created in nature in africa but also for the discussion of um the inequalities already existing in access to information and knowledge representing themselves within the context of covid and lockdown um it's important i thought it actually be at the back of our heads that this discussion and we're talking about the colonization and promoting access to knowledge it's both those aspects it goes all the way back to where we currently find ourselves and how our teaching is essentially being able to to go on in other parts of the world while it's limited um in most parts of africa um maria perhaps you can you can essentially tie this up for us with um where you want your projects to go what you think is still missing and you need but what what possibilities lie in in this discussion going forward yes so i'm going to i'm going to make uh one very practical suggestion and i think and that has been tried and tested elsewhere so it's don't take credit for coming up with it um but i would like to suggest i mean the the african lee and the lee's in africa have already started publishing books um written by leo scott so if you go on to zimli for example uh there are full books on criminal law on um well actually for south africans or an african lee uh for criminal law human rights etc are already being published on those leases open access books that students are accessing every day so i will just like to invite african scholars i mean to consider this as an outlet you know the lease is an outlet of this kind of work um secondly even for papers that are going to make it one day into a journal into a peer review journal and being published i mean you can it's as far as i know most uh publishers are um amenable to allowing authors to publish their unfinalized paper in an open access repository so that is one code that we will be making as african lee to all law faculties across sub-saharan africa um do consider we are going to create a repository and we are going to ask scholars to consider putting their output as papers uh not necessarily journals articles as a first step onto that repository and i think that that's you know starting with these small steps um as we have seen with primary legal materials this uh will incentivize african scholars to you know come out of the show if we if we if some of them have those concerns and um publish in those repositories more i mean just like i mean we all learn as part of the learning process actually we look at the work of others in fact clearly you started with this how you build on the efforts of others and including in law as you look at how other judges write you mean you tell your judges look how other scholars write you learn how to write so take me to the second point i mean d um you mentioned that you and and your center will be creating some resources on writing legal scholarship again if that might be available for uh open access the actual training material we would be happy to disseminate uh those through our platforms as i said we are accessed by 400 000 people in africa every uh most of them uh legos um legal professionals or scholars we are accessed by those people and we are a good platform to reach out to those people and make it available uh you know when i think about it the when i think about legal writing the first thing comes up is the our laboratory in the in the united states again the u.s university there is something african can be published we'd be happy to uh to hold that um so i would like to end on the note i mean we invite you to publish your work via the leasing in the in the best in the most practical way possible um considering that there is still a discussion to be had around um the gatekeepers and what the institutional difficulties around open access might be and implementing open access might be uh for legal scholars in africa we think that there is still an opportunity there to be had to leapfrog some of the issues that perhaps have plagued uh scholars in the west so just like we did with primary materials we don't have to have printed law reports we can just go into digital access and maybe there is a different model that we need to explore all together in that thank you olivine okay thank you maria and i want to thank my panelist um i've essentially looked at the q and a session i was hoping some people would put questions here but they're putting comments somewhere else um and so here i have two questions so far in the q and a um if anybody has a couple of questions you can put in there and then the last five minutes we just um relay the questions to the panelists the first one and this is a general run to any one of you so any one of you can pick it up patricia says that the tradition of in-house university journals which are often student-led appears to have declined she did not clarify whether it's in western universities and african university um she asks do panels think that this has exacerbated the access of payroll issues they have identified so any one of you d so i'm not sure whether patricia is speaking specifically there about us um uh journals um being student-led because that's that's generally the place where that tends to um to be the practice um and uh and if and if it is then honestly i can say part of my my immense disillusionment with those kinds of journals comes from actually having worked on one of them um and seen what happens when eight very well educated students pause uh fairy dust on a very poor draft from a very important professor um and so knowing the investment that actually goes into producing um those outstanding top tier journal articles um versus again what we're actually able to uh to do here where we you know we don't have eight students who are uh checking our concitations and um copy editing for us and things we're doing that ourselves between uh two and three in the morning with all the kinds of challenges that tina and azubica have um have pointed to um yeah so i'm afraid that's a that's a long way of not entirely answering the question um but just kind of riffing off it okay um thank you very much b and and the next question is essentially for tina and g uh thank you tina and g your your insight was especially it resonated with me um so that's what mary page says um and much of much of what you say essentially personally um makes sense for me you say that the colonization means no longer having to be a research entrepreneur so the question is um any thoughts on steps that could be taken to make the process of researching africa less cumbersome for doctoral candidates and every career researchers on the continent but also abroad yeah i mean i think a starting point what has really helped me is mentorship is so so important um i think having people that you are accessible um who have dealt with some of these challenges in a more even a more severe way is useful and has helped me so having someone to help you navigate the system because it is it's a system it's a coded system that you have to learn how to navigate so if you're a doctoral candidate i'm not sure who asked the question but i think that the phd process is extremely lonely um you basically start the process and you're told i mean i had at least one year of coursework in the us you have to do some methodology coursework and whatnot so that was helpful but i describe it as a process where you know you're told come back in four or five years with a book basically so i think you have to be proactive about seeking out that support um and having someone help having someone show you the roast but then also being willing to be that um as you move forward and yeah thank you um thank you to nanogen perhaps in terms of the african context identifying scholars whether it's in the u.s or in i mean in africa or uk in africa that you feel um speak to the context that you want to write about and having them not necessarily as formal mental but mentors but informal mentors to support the contextual journey because sometimes the difficulties becomes that you ever supervise or doesn't necessarily comprehend the context and so it makes it very difficult for you to research you don't have somebody to sign post to you to the scholarly information you're looking for so it helps um also identifying both formal mentors as well as and and scholars that may be identified through the institution but also synergy highlighted perhaps informal mentors on the continent and if you if you can um if you do have control of the process of who say your your supervisor is that's important as well to seek out i mean i don't know how you can do a phd um with somebody that's completely divorced from the context that you're researching so i think also being more i don't understand what it's like you know to be a student and apply that's the other thing that we haven't even gotten into where you just want to get into a phd program so do you even have the space to start negotiating um supervisors and whatnot but i know a lot of institutions do allow you to do that and i know a lot of institutions won't accept students and unless there is a supervisor i can take on that work so i think just being very intentional in the beginning about aligning yourself um with people that understand the context perhaps not perfectly but um in a way that will be useful to you okay and i'm just going to pick one last question so that we can close this session um what do panellists think about using western scholars as phd examiners in work related specific aspects of the law on the continent uh yeah can i can i come in yes okay yeah so i i think basically it's about expertise okay and there is need for us to become more visible on the african continent um by our walks and by these networks then you begin to know because definitely if someone wants to examine a student working on education law in africa and as of the case not visible then the person would be looking for a western scholar and it becomes that challenging so i think what we are doing now by the kind of mentorships that we are having you know i i almost forgot to mention kelly mounds who is also doing a great job in mentoring by the number of south saharan african scholars we are building a base we are building a data base that we can now fall back on for this so i think it's something that is going to disappear because before now you wanted to read about rwanda you want to read about gacha cha you're not reading an african scholar you're reading some western scholar you want to read about the lra you're reading some western scholar you want to read about bo koharam you're reading some western scholar but i think that narrative is changing now because we have african scholars who are now more empowered who are now more exposed coming up with literature in this area so i think it's something that would appear in time we just need to get ourselves prepared to be relevant thank you azubiki and perhaps in closing and thank you so much to all my panellists i think in terms of scholarship um there's also need for scholars in western institutions um both of of african descent and those who work on africa to to find the importance of building scholarships very honest scholarships um i mean scholar relation scholar relation relationships with those who are on the african context very much um acknowledging the limitations that distance essentially presents when you're somewhere away from the context and so that would essentially limit all these issues that are coming up when it comes to identifying for instance external examinance it's easy to do so using people who both understand the scholarship but also the context if you already have these relationships built and so i feel that there are relationships already built but it's important to strengthen those between institutions in africa and in the west and for those relationships to be based in equality and also a honest understanding that everybody's bringing something to the table and that essentially provides a set up that we would need going forward with it's providing phd examining phd or co-writing together but from from a position of equality from a position of acknowledging um the contribution that is essentially being brought in and not just from a position of exploitation and while the gatekeeping continues to be maintained in western institutions um with all that i would like to thank all my panelists and participants we went 15 minutes of 19 minutes above the time limits that we had set for ourselves but it was a very interesting discussion thank you nene chibanda from lusaka thank you this meet from k-town um my alma mater uh thank you azubica onora oguno from illorin azubiki and i were at the university of prittoria together at some point maria bedeva bright thank you very much thank you so much professor brina manji and all the professors and doctors who were in this session thank you so much for sitting in this session with us and for being patient as i took you a bit over time you have a very good day