Precolonialism: Nelson Mandela and the Law of the LawCarrol Clarkson and Peter FitzpatrickIn his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela expresses his admiration and respect for both the law and its judicial institution, even as the pervasive legal oppressions of apartheid are being brought to bear upon him. Derrida, in his essay, "The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration," asks whether the law that Mandela admires is "essentially a thing of the West." He goes on to ask, "Does its formal universality retain some irreducible link with European history?" If this is the case, then the struggle against apartheid would amount to a "domestic war that the West carried on with itself, in its own name." But Mandela also expresses his admiration for the "structure and organization of early African societies" in a time "before the arrival of the white man." In opposing the apartheid laws, Mandela has recourse to what Derrida variously terms a "superior law," a "law beyond legality," an "unfailing sentiment of justice," "conscience," a "law of laws"
Yet these "superior laws" are not ideals detached from a contrary legal reality. They are qualities intrinsic to the being of law, to its integral extensiveness, enabling law to extend to a precolonial alterity - an alterity reducible neither to "the ethnographic present" nor to a pervasive occidental domination. Just what that alterity could be and just how it could be evoked by a condign law in South Africa are matters explored in this paper. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]