FEATURING - UBuntu and the Law: African Ideals and Postapartheid Jurisprudence by Nyoko Muvangua and Drucilla Cornell.

Posted on April 08, 2025

The Special Collections Book of the Week this week is:

UBuntu and the Law: African Ideals and Postapartheid Jurisprudence by Nyoko Muvangua and Drucilla Cornell.

This is the first comprehensive casebook to address the relationship of ubuntu to law. It also provides the most important critical articles on the use of ubuntu, both by the Constitutional Court and by other levels of the judiciary in South Africa. Although ubuntu is an ideal or value rooted in South Africa, its purchase as a performative ethic of the human goes beyond its roots in African languages. Indeed, this casebook helps break through some of the stale antinomies in the discussions of cultures and rights, because both the courts and the critical essays discuss ubuntu as not simply an Indigenous or even African ideal but as one that, in its own terms, calls for universal justification.

This book is a crucial resource for anyone who is seriously grappling with human rights, postcolonial constitutionalism, and competing visions of the relations between law and justice.

Access: https://univofpretoria.on.worldcat.org/oclc/630468123

This book is available at Special Collections, housed on level 5 of the Merensky 2 Library, and is part of our Africana (ZA) Collection.

The Special Collections unit of the Department of Library Services plays a stewardship role in the acquisition and preservation of the Library's rare and valuable information resources, making them accessible to students, staff and researchers, as well as safeguarding them for future generations.

- Author Sonto Mabena and Nikki Haw

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