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During the 1920s and 1930s, black South Africans were subjected to a large number of discriminatory laws. African leaders of the time decried both this and the iniquities Africans faced when dealing with the justice system. Curiously, though, some of those same leaders expressed confidence in South Africa’s judges and the balanced approach with which they ran their courtrooms. In this article, we explore the accuracy of those statements by seeking quantifiable evidence that South Africa’s judges acted impartially toward African defendants standing before them. The evidence of hundreds of criminal review and criminal appeal judgments demonstrates that Africans were subject to considerably different standards of fairness, depending on where within the judicial system their case was heard. Alleged violators of the law were usually tried first in the magistrates’ courts. Magistrates were government civil servants, and their courts were crowded venues in which decisions were often meted out too quickly and on limited evidence. A fair hearing was often denied. However, an unusual oversight system, consisting of automatic reviews and initiated appeals before trained judges in the country’s superior courts, led to impartial hearings and a small measure of justice, with judges regularly overturning magistrates’ decisions. Judges intervened in the decisions of magistrates when they determined that there had been errors of law or irregularities of trial process or sentencing that led to failures of justice that were prejudicial to defendants. We conclude that, at least in some circumstances, Africans could anticipate an impartial hearing before the country’s judges, and that the stated confidence in judges was not without foundation. © 2025 The Editorial Board of the Journal of Southern African Studies.
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In May of 1746, slaving captain Christiaan Hagerop illegally captured ten Gold Coast canoe paddlers, seven of whom were free Africans from Elmina and Fante. Hagerop subsequently sailed to Suriname, where he sold the paddlers into slavery. To appease the relatives of the captured men and to safeguard its reputation among local Africans, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) launched a search for the kidnapped paddlers. Six of the men were eventually located in Suriname in 1749, the seventh having died in slavery. While the Africans were transported back to the Gold Coast via Amsterdam, the WIC tried to have Hagerop extradited to its Gold Coast possessions to receive punishment for his crime. A legal battle over jurisdictional competence ensued in the Dutch Republic, the outcome of which was that the captain was made to stand trial in Amsterdam, but in the end he received very little punishment. © 2016 Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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By using new sources and a complementary historical and geo-analytical approach, this article Illustrates that the Natives Land Act (no. 27 of 1913) failed to stop Africans from buying land. New evidence demonstrates that African land ownership outside the reserves in the Transvaal actually increased after 1913. This evidence leads to a deeper questioning of the extent to which the South African government was able to impose rural territorial segregation by 1936 and reveals the limits of white power in the early Union period.
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