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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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Propaganda in the first half of the 20th century is usually associated with the atrocity stories from World War I and the anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazi regime and World War II. This chapter provides a brief overview of the history of propaganda and propaganda theory before turning its attention to a theory of propaganda in civil war. It argues that what makes propaganda in a civil war unique is that it is a combination of both political and war propaganda. Current research on propaganda theory emphasizes that propaganda is in service of an ideology and focuses on propaganda as disseminating information that tries to avoid reason and veracity. The chapter argues that propagandists in a civil war setting are presenting the ‘truth’ as they understand it. Informed by Carl Schmitt’s “friend/enemy” distinction in his Concept of the Political, the author argues that each side argued and was convinced that they represented the values and interests of the nation and its people, and that because the stakes of the conflict were so high that all actions could be justified.
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There is an “under-representation problem” in philosophy departments and journals. Empirical data suggest that while we have seen some improvements since the 1990s, the rate of change has slowed down. Some posit that philosophy has disciplinary norms making it uniquely resistant to change. We present results from an empirical case study of a philosophy department that achieved and maintained male-female gender parity among its faculty as early as 2014. Our analysis extends beyond matters of gender parity because that is only one, albeit important, dimension of inclusion. We build from the study to reflect on strategies that may catalyze change.
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