Lawyers of East Africa Unite: Federal Pan-Africanism’s International Court, Dar es Salaam’s Radical Academics, and the Meaning of East African Law after Decolonization

Abstract

In the aftermath of formal independence, two institutions, the East African Court of Appeal (EACA) and the University of Dar es Salaam School of Law, became important international barometers of the potential of post-colonial legal radicalism. Due to the unique power of federal Pan-Africanism in East Africa, the EACA survived the wave of dissolution that claimed similar colonial courts of law. If the EACA represented the formal apotheosis of one version of supranational law, it was the law school at the University of Dar es Salaam, which produced a deeper and wider development of legal thought about the circumstances of law in East Africa. The scholarship produced in Dar es Salaam not only undergirded the legal academies of multiple East African nations but proved globally influential for several left and left-liberal schools of thought. Despite the loose and imperfect coordination of these parallel bodies, the project of East African law shared by the Court and University provides unique insights into the opening for anticolonial or heterodox visions of the law that existed in the opening of twentieth century decolonization and independence. The legal institutions of federal Pan-Africanism usefully illustrate both the unexpected successes and structural limitations on atypical iterations of internationalist Global South legal radicalism.