The Land Is Ours: South Africa's First Black Lawyers and the Birth Of Constitutionalism

This review essay comprises two main parts. The first provides a brief overview of the books that focuses on detailing how the authors approach their respective subject matter, in particular connecting historical occurrences to contemporary upheavals. The second part makes a critical intervention by interrogating some of the arguments made by the authors to determine whether their historical claims indeed support the conclusions they proffer regarding the state of contemporary South African constitutionalism. In particular, the article engages the texts at the point at which they are demonstrably at pains to position themselves as being in conversation with the present, as they seek to mount a simultaneous defence and rescue of the current South African constitutional project from antagonists accused of either misunderstanding or attacking the constitution's Eurocentric origins.