The Land Is Ours tells the story of South Africa’s first black lawyers, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In an age of aggressive colonial expansion, land dispossession and forced labour, these men believed in a constitutional system that respected individual rights and freedoms, and they used the law as an instrument against injustice.
The book follows the lives, ideas and careers of Henry Sylvester Williams, Alfred Mangena, Richard Msimang, Pixley ka Isaka Seme, Ngcubu Poswayo and George Montsioa, most of whom were also members of the ANC. It analyses the legal cases they took on, explores how they reconciled the law with the political upheavals of the day, and considers how they sustained their fidelity to the law when legal victories were undermined by politics.
The Land Is Ours shows how these lawyers developed the concept of a Bill of Rights, which is now an international norm. Amid current suspicion of the Constitution and its protection of individual rights, the book clearly demonstrates that, from the beginning, the struggle for freedom was based on the ideas of constitutionalism and the rule of law.