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PROCEDURE AS POLITICS IN THE CAPE COLONY: THE CAREER OF ANDREW GONTSHI, 1880–1904
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 January 2021
Abstract
In 1881, Andrew Gontshi became the first black law agent in the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope and thus South Africa's first black lawyer. Records of court cases argued by Gontshi and his fellow black law agents provide a rich new archive for understanding the political sensibilities of the nineteenth-century Eastern Cape, where Gontshi practiced law and participated in the development of new forms of political organization, as well as the meaning of law to black intellectuals. In both law and politics, Andrew Gontshi employed procedural tactics to hold the state accountable to its own formalities. In Gontshi's world, law provided not a source of justice but a set of tools that could be used to advance a political agenda. Gontshi's story thus prompts a reconsideration of law's place in the intellectual tradition of South Africa's liberation struggle.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press
Footnotes
I would like to thank Jacob Dlamini, Katie Hindmarch-Watson, and all of the participants in the 2017 Northeastern Workshop on Southern Africa, the Johns Hopkins African Studies Seminar, the University of Michigan African Studies Seminar, and the 2018–19 Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies Fellowship. Jeff Peires both provided valuable feedback and generously shared his own research.
References
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51 The cases were classified differently by the two courts due to uncertainty over whether the theft was an act of war and thus immune from criminal prosecution.
52 Girdwood also charged the two men with perjury, but the records of that case do not survive.
53 E. Thornberry, Colonizing Consent: Rape and Political Authority in South Africa's Eastern Cape (New York, 2018), 123. Girdwood also practiced medicine in Nqamakwe in the late 1870s and had occasionally appeared in court in this capacity.
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59 K. Breckenridge, ‘No will to know: the rise and fall of African civil registration in twentieth-century South Africa’, in K. Breckenridge and S. Szretzer (eds.), Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford, 2012), 367–68.
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64 Commission on Native Laws and Customs, minutes of evidence, 280–1. See also the testimony of W. Girdwood, 270.
65 Commission on Native Laws and Customs, minutes of evidence, 501.
66 Criminal cases were automatically reviewed by the Chief Magistrate but could be appealed to the Eastern Districts Court. Between 1882 and 1894, civil cases could be appealed to either venue. After 1894, civil cases between African litigants could only be appealed to the Chief Magistrate. Administration of Justice Act (no. 40 of 1882). See also Native Territories Penal Code (no. 24 of 1886), sec. 268; Native Territories Appeal Act (no. 26 of 1894); Native Territories Appeal Amendment Act (no. 32 of 1898).
67 Gontshi took an active role in directing this case; see CA GSC 6/1/1/17, A. Gontshi to Registrar of the Eastern Districts Court, 22 Sept. 1892.
68 CA CMT 2/35, J. T. O'Connor, ‘Annual report for the year ending 31 December 1890’. For a similar complaint, see Commission on Native Law and Custom, minutes of evidence, testimony of W. Flynn, 280.
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89 Quoted in Odendaal, Founders, 31.
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92 ‘Statement of Sodasizi, 6 Aug. 1884’, in Use and Employment of Convicts, 5. Sodasizi's vehement insistence that he did not know this man may indicate an attempt to conceal the man's true identity, but there is no evidence that Gontshi or another law agent wrote the petition.
93 ‘Prisoners’ complaint’ and ‘Statement of Maqeza’, in Use and Employment of Convicts, 7–8.
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