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This chapter examines the delicate balance achieved by apex courts in new democracies when dealing with impunity for rights violations during times of transitional justice. While international law has clearly rejected amnesties for past rights violations, domestic politics sometimes incorporate amnesties as part of larger peace settlements. This puts courts in the difficult situation of balancing the competing demands of law and politics. Courts have achieved equipoise in this situation by adopting substantive interpretations and procedural approaches that use international law’s rights-based language but without implementing international law’s restrictions on amnesties. In many cases, courts do this without acknowledging the necessarily pragmatic nature of their decisions. In fact, oftentimes courts find ways of avoiding having to make any substantive decision, effectively removing themselves from a dispute that could call into question their adherence to international legal norms that transcend politics. In doing so, they empower political actors to continue down the road toward negotiated peace settlements, while at the same time protecting the courts’ legitimacy as institutions uniquely situated to protect international human rights norms – including those they have effectively deemphasized in the process.

This chapter considers how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists in Namibia and South Africa appropriate discourses of decolonization associated with African national liberation movements. I examine the legal, cultural, and political possibilities associated with LGBT activists’ framing of law reform as a decolonization project. LGBT activists identified laws governing gender and sexual nonconformity as in particular need of reform. Using data from daily ethnographic observation of LGBT movement organizations, in-depth qualitative interviews with LGBT activists, and newspaper articles about political homophobia, I elucidate how Namibian and South African LGBT activists conceptualize movement challenges to antigay laws as decolonization.

In this article Professor Perry argues that Plessy v. Ferguson and the de jure segregation it heralded has overdetermined the discourse on Jim Crow. She demonstrates through a historical analysis of activist movements, popular literature, and case law that private law, specifically property and contract, were significant aspects of Jim Crow law and culture. The failure to understand the significance of private law has limited the breadth of juridical analyses of how to respond to racial divisions and injustices. Perry therefore contends that a paradigmatic shift is necessary in scholarly analyses of the Jim Crow era, to include private law, and moreover that this shift will enrich our understandings of both historic and current inequalities.

Indigenous governance systems in Africa provide a nuanced approach to the various philosophies that underpin governance structures through a spiritual perspective. In this chapter we debunk colonial narratives of Africa's dependence on colonial constructs of governance. We begin by highlighting the decentralized and centralized Indigenous governance frameworks practiced by different African communities. Communities with decentralized systems such as the Acholi, Luo, Keiyo, amongst others, were well organized at the local level, with the Council of Elders, Chief Priests, and Moral Elders and Chiefs carrying out various functions that ensured the community remained stable and prosperous. In centralized communities, the king had authority over their boundaries. The key aspects that stood out and ensured stability within the centralized systems included community representation, participation in governance, and checks and balances that provided proper societal growth as exemplified by the Bunyoro-Kitara and the Ashanti kingdoms. Even though the governance systems were quite different, the governance mechanisms had similar pillars, features, and principles anchored by humanism, communism, and the spiritual nature of governance amongst the African peoples. We concur that the Indigenous governance system allowed citizens, empires, and kingdoms to flourish. We conclude that African people can further develop the capacity to manage their ideas, resources, and opportunities for sustainable development, through Indigenous governance mechanisms and knowledge systems. We argue that African societies need to legally integrate the Indigenous governance systems in the current prevalent western governance model, create canters for researching Indigenous knowledge at the institutions of higher learning, and that civil society should play a role in ensuring accountability in governance systems.

Ever since this area of scholarship has been developed in the West, what has generally been taught, researched and written about in the organisation/management field have been primarily English and North American theories about and practices in organisations. This focus has also been adopted by scholars and teachers all over the world, so that mainstream organisation/management scholarship is generally synonymous with western systems. However organisation and management, though not necessarily described in those terms, have existed in all societies through their economic, social and political arrangements, regardless of period, types of activity and stages of technological development.

It is here proposed to examine some African traditional societies in terms of their economic, social and political systems and compare them with mainstream Anglo-Saxon theories and practices. The main focus of this study will be on questions of accountability. Areas to be investigated are the assumptions underlying theories and practices in both types of societies; the systems in practice; their advantages and disadvantages and crucially whether western approaches have anything to learn from these traditional systems, now diminished in power and scope but still very much present in many parts of Africa. The converse question might also be put – can those traditional systems still extant benefit from Anglo-Saxon models of organisation and management?

There are difficulties with such a project. Differences in time, space, culture, size, economic activity and technology must make for problems for researchers. There are then the problems faced by any researcher in terms of their ‘habitus’ or ‘situatedness’ and the need for awareness of their own potential influences on their research. How much more problematic might this prove when examining very different cultures and attempting to make comparisons between their social systems in different time spans, different locations and in entirely different global political and economic contexts?

British social anthropologists, studying traditional societies during the colonial period, had the additional difficulties of being part of (or seen as part of) an occupying colonial administration. Normal difficulties concerning problems with information given to researchers by informants were compounded by this political context in which a great deal of scholarship about traditional societies was produced. This has been discussed over the decades by social anthropologists and sociologists, and will be addressed in this chapter, as at least some of the information used is from that period.

However, despite the difficulties, there is value in such comparisons and in heightening awareness of issues such as accountability in non-western systems as compared with questions of accountability in western institutions. This is relevant for those teaching organisation and management studies – not least to students from other parts of the world, and for practitioners who might gain some advantage from considering different systems and practices, and possibly also gain more insight into their own situations.

In this chapter, the authors interrogate the structures, natures, processes, and variables that shape globalized collegiate desegregation. The authors pay attention to the history of segregation in South African culture, then proceed to current efforts to dismantle and rebuild the country’s educational enterprise. Drawing parallels with segregation policy in the United States, the authors argue that both nations may draw from global lessons about systemic global anti-Black oppression and its structural forms (e.g., apartheid, inequities in higher education). More specifically, the authors ground arguments in an analysis of the linguistic hegemony that continues to inculcate the college-aspiring students of South Africa. Understanding fundamental desegregation characteristics of racial hegemonic nations (e.g., United States) vis-à-vis racial and linguistic hegemonic nations (e.g., South Africa) is imperative to increase understanding of democratization of educational systems throughout the world.

This chapter explores the governance structures of Indigenous societies with special focus on the Meru community in Kenya. The chapter reviews the elaborate structure of governance that ensured and entrenched the basic parameters of a fair society. It outlines the impact caused by colonization and the subsequent loss of social fabrics that bound individual members and the entire community. The colonizers looked at the Indigenous as primitive and backward. They therefore classified them as tribes, natives' ethnic nationalities all of which demeaned the Indigenous communities. From such derogatory perspectives, the Indigenous systems including governance, culture, social, legal and judiciary, philosophy, economic systems were replaced with supposedly more advanced systems to assimilate and “modernize” Indigenous peoples. The chapter will demonstrate how these critical aspects and components of governance existed within the Indigenous governance structures of the Ameru community long before the colonial government. The chapter by use of practical illustrations advocates for decolonial perspectives to the realization of fair governance.

This chapter is an overview of herstorical, political and theatrical developments in South Africa. It provides an overview of the background to the herstory of South Africa from 1912–1993.

Dates are included which have relevance to the herstory of South African Women; for example, 1912 was the year of the formation of the African National Congress (ANC); in 1913 Charlotte Maxeke led a march against pass laws for African women; the Native Land Act of 1913 stated that natives were no longer able to buy, sell or lease outside the stipulated reserves; the Influx Control and The Natives Urban Act of 1923 and amendments to the Act in 1937 had devastating consequences for African women as it severely restricted their movements from rural to urban areas. The year 1930 is important because this was when white South African women acquired the vote which gave political activists such as Helen Joseph and Helen Suzman a political voice. In 1948 the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) was formed. Political events from the 1970s through to 1993, demonstrate how the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), the African National Congress (ANC), other anti-apartheid organisations and the apartheid government realised the effectiveness of theatre as a political weapon