Sister Jabou and all,

I received this one from Dr. Ebrima Sall.



Momodou

 

Issa G. Shivji

Faculty of Law

University of Dar es Salaam

P. O. Box 953

Dar es Salaam

[log in to unmask]

 

 

9th April 2003

 

 

To:       1.            Professor Kenneth King

Director, Centre of African Studies

Edinburgh, Scotland

 

2.                  Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Centro de Estudos Sociais

Coimbra, Portugal

 

 

Dear Kenneth and Boa:

 

RE: 1) International conference on: REMAKING LAW IN AFRICA: TRANSNATIONALISM, PERSONS, AND RIGHTS, 21ST-22ND May, 2002 - Edinburgh

2) International Conference on: LAW AND JUSTICE IN THE XXIST CENTURY, 29TH - 31ST MAY 2003 - Coimbra, Portugal

___________________

 

Like many all over the world, I have spent the last days and weeks and months in great agony, as the current assault and massacre of Law, Justice and Humanity by the most rapacious imperial power on earth has unfolded. Death, destruction, and human misery have turned into celluloid images analysed and dissected by retired majors and "embedded" journalists with utter cynicism and shameless glee while exhorting the virtues of precision bombing. Shame itself is ashamed as marines descend from their tanks to throw water bottles to traumatised thirsty Iraqis while tanks fire at Basra's water plants.

 

In this state, I am finding it impossible to intellectualise on Re-making Law in Africa and muse over Law and Justice in the 21st century. Law, Justice and Liberation have all been murdered! How can we resurrect them? (Perhaps, what we need is insurrection, not resurrection.) 

 

I am afraid, I cannot simply bring myself to attend these conferences. I know both of you will be disappointed. I also know that you have gone out of your way to make it possible for me to attend. But I also know that you, and many others at these conferences (except perhaps a few "embedded" intellectuals who, hopefully, will not dare attend!), share my anxiety and outrage. Perhaps, the conferences will be an occasion for us to huddle together, agonise and share our outrage. But, as we all know, the institutional hegemony of our universities would not allow us to do so except perhaps in pubs in the evenings after going through the pretence of presenting papers and discussing the profundity of 'law and justice'. Enough of intellectual schizophrenia! 

 

No, for once, I want to be myself. Let me cuddle my son and hope that his generation will place this world back on its feet. Millions, who marched the streets and proclaimed, 'No Blood for Oil' have seen the future .. That's the only rational and humane thing that can be said and done. In all sincerity, in this context, can we really talk about re-making law in Africa? In whose image? In the image of Anglo-American "law and justice"? How can I theorise about law and justice as the terrain of struggles for liberation and freedom of the oppressed, theses I'm so fond of, when American 2000-pounder bombs labelled "liberation and freedom for Iraq" are burying 13-year olds like my son deep down in the ground? 

 

No, thank you.! I shall not utter 'liberation' until I see the ghosts of the 13-year olds dancing on buried tanks and APCs!

 

 

Sincerely,

 

 

___________

Issa Shivji 

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