(31 March 1950—18 December 2020)
AN UNRECONSTRUCTED AFRICAN RADICAL
By Bernard Martin and Raymond Koen
We had the good fortune of producing and editing a festschrift for Lovell in 2016.
We thought that the first anniversary of his passing called for a short but new appreciation of his life and work.
Our attempt at a novel reading is presented below.
Unlike so many of us, Lovell understood the purpose of life as an obligation to leave this world in a better condition than that in which he found it. It was this conviction which informed all his relationships, whether personal, professional or political and whether individual or collective. He knew that most human beings are buckling under the cosh of oppression and exploitation. And he was steadfast in his determination to resist those who would harass and harm their fellow human beings in pursuit of exorbitant profits and petty political agendas.
This approach to the world and his fellow human beings made him a true radical, that is, one committed unconditionally to drilling down to the root of all phenomena and relations. This worldview defined his existence, it governed his interactions and it informed his decision-making. He never wavered, even in the face of constant pressures from all sorts and quarters, to look the other way. He had antennae for chicanery and a nose for charlatanry, and would expose and oppose both relentlessly. He remained, to the end, a dyed-in-the-wool and unrepentant radical.
Many have highlighted Lovell’s easy-going personality, his non-demanding way of dealing with people, his likeability and his tolerance. Those indeed were enviable characteristics which contributed hugely to making him the man of countless moments whom we remember with such fondness. But perhaps they conceal their own origin. Lovell was so personable and self-effacing precisely because he was so secure in his life’s work and so confident in the unalloyed foundation which structured his life’s work. He appeared inoffensive precisely because he was wholly offensive in his pursuit of truth and justice. We risk not understanding his life’s work if we fail to appreciate that he died as he had lived — a militant radical.
One area where this may be seen is in his university teaching. There is general agreement amongst colleagues and students (including those students who became colleagues) that Lovell was an excellent teacher, a maestro who could shape his subject matter into indelible stories. However, the ease which he did this belies the fact that, for him, teaching was always a subversive activity. The lecture hall was where he opened the eyes of students to an alternative view of law and history. His story-telling was both didactic and insurgent. Lovell had mastered both Africanisation and decolonisation in his teaching of law long before they became buzzwords in the legal academy. And even when it became obvious that formal commitments to Africanisation and decolonisation would remain largely formal, Lovell never relented in his mission to subvert the hegemony which the Western pedagogy enjoyed in law.
That was Lovell the radical. He saw early on that legal education was dominated by colonialist ideas and methods emanating from the minority world of the white Global North. Having decided that it should not be so, he set about undermining that domination systematically and persistently. Unlike so many others, he did not need to be told to Africanise and decolonise. Black lives always mattered to him: long before the contemporary BLM movement took shape, he was waiting for his fellow academics to catch up with him in this regard. To be sure, he was saddened when it emerged that so many proclamations of Africanisation and decolonisation were also so much hot air. But he persevered, promoting them in practice and with gratifying success, while others were floundering about how to implement them.
Importantly, for him Africanisation and decolonisation did not stop at the law curriculum. He was keen to see them applied also to law teachers. He himself was a product of UWC and had gone on to become a senior professor at the institution which had played a formative role in shaping his values and politics. He had an unshakeable belief in the capacity of UWC law students, born and bred in South Africa, to become law teachers at UWC and other South African universities. This is why he would speak always of “growing our own timber”. For him, that was the key to Africanising and decolonising the law teaching staff. Again, this was Lovell the radical, going to the root of things. He understood that so much that was wrong and undesirable about law and its teaching was an external imposition, a colonial importation. He understood also that the problems could not be remedied by “parachuting” in academics who, even if black, had no real connections with or thorough appreciation of the historical and political context of South African universities. For him, proper transformation had to be rooted in “growing our own timber”. Who better to Africanise and decolonise law and its teaching at historically black universities than young black South African women and men academics who had been educated at these universities? He considered counter-arguments about poor salaries at historically black universities, better prospects elsewhere, lack of doctoral qualifications and lack of academic seniority to be so many excuses not to transform, not to Africanise and decolonise, as so many attempts to defend the status quo. He was revolted by recurring attempts to trivialise and individualise the legitimate concerns of junior black academics. And he was deeply disappointed by the seeming inertia of so many South African law faculties to formulate and implement plans to appoint, nurture and develop young black South African women and men as law academics. Indeed, he was angered that universities which were proclaiming transformation, Africanisation and decolonisation, appeared reluctant to do something so elementary to promote those most laudable of objectives. Be that as it may, we can rest assured that the timber which Lovell helped to grow at UWC, has made and will continue to make a not insignificant impact upon the teaching and practice of law across Africa.
It has been said that Lovell knew everybody —and God! This certainly is true. However, not everybody knew Lovell the radical. And not everybody knew that his theism was of the radical sort. He did not embrace the oft touted notion of a jealous, demanding and punitive God and he was never heard to proclaim the infallibility of Christian beliefs. He had a deeply philosophical approach to religion in which human agency was central. He understood religion to provide some of the answers to the imponderables of life, or at least to provide a route to excavating those imponderables. He had a kind of cosmic comprehension of the deity, an almost Wordsworthian pantheism, structured by Lutheran doctrine. Whatever the specificities of his beliefs (he was never strident about them), the overwhelming sense one received from Lovell was that his was a faith tied intimately to his search for truth and justice. It was not faith for faith’s sake, it was not an individualistic faith, it was not an apolitical faith. His was a faith anchored in the here and now, in the trials and tribulations which the majority of people had to negotiate against the machinations of the powerful and the corrupt. He may have believed in an afterlife, but he did not understand it as the solution to our earthly hardships and privations. He believed that life ought to be abundant and good for all, and was always prepared to do what he could to promote such terrestrial abundance and goodness. This was Lovell, ever the radical, rejecting the commonsensical and the superficial, and going to the root of things.
Politically, Lovell was, at minimum, a radical democrat. He took seriously the democratic ideal of government of the people, by the people, for the people. The people always mattered most to him, and he despised those professional politicians who saw in democracy all kinds of business opportunities and money-making schemes. He was furious that the South African democratic revolution had stumbled so quickly and collapsed so completely. He was vexed that all the promises of democratic transformation had been reduced to a ceremonial exercise of the right to vote every few years. He hated the fraud and corruption which came so easily and openly to so many supposed tribunes of the people. He had a comprehensive and first-hand understanding of the history of the South African liberation struggle and refused to accept that so much had been sacrificed for the illicit enrichment of the new political elite. For him, the liberation struggle was a people’s struggle and the people had to be the primary beneficiaries of victory. Lovell the radical democrat was resolute in his commitment to a root and branch people’s democracy.
An acknowledged expert in criminal law and justice, in his later years Lovell turned his attention to the law of economic crime in general and to anti-money laundering law in particular. As is well known, he was pivotal to pioneering the study of the law of economic crime and to launching the Journal of Anti-Corruption Law in the Department of Criminal Justice and Procedure at UWC. In these endeavours, too, he was a radical through and through. Thus, despite its title, the Journal of Anti-Corruption Law never was meant to be a repository only for black letter legal pieces, but was intended from the start to give generous space also to contributions which ventured outside the purely legal, into the domains of sociology, philosophy, economics, and the like. Also, in his own research, Lovell was interrogating the ways in which the international law of economic crime promoted the economic and geo-political interests of the minority world at the expense of those of the majority world. It is not too difficult to see that his dissent in this legal sphere was a direct consequence of his radical commitment to truth and justice.
Lovell’s motif, then, was radicalism in all things. And if one goes to the root of all things, one is necessarily both sceptical of glib explanations and subversive of conventional wisdom in all things. He could spot nonsense masquerading as academic rigour a mile away. He knew that racists, sexists and other scoundrels would try to camouflage their real thoughts and feelings with fancy talk of academic standards and qualifications and intellectualism. He understood that the powerful always would attempt to prescribe to the powerless, and present it as allowing them access to the perceived benefits of western civilisation. He knew that the righteous anger of the oppressed always would be distorted by the oppressors as outbursts of irrational ungratefulness. His profound grasp of the ways of power and the techniques of oppression fueled a steely determination to resist them. The Lovell whom everybody knew and liked was also the scourge of all forms of bigotry and his laser accurate analysis humbled their purveyors, who, despite their best efforts, did not possess sufficient imagination to conceal their bigotry.
His radicalism was founded upon a towering intellect which was superior to most and second to none. That in itself was an affront to those inveterate racists who would not countenance the possibility of a black person besting them intellectually. What is more, his was not the kind of linear intelligence shaped by the supposedly scientific mien of the West, being blessed with a breadth of philosophical intelligence which transcended the straitjacket of western formal logic. It was an intelligence which enabled him to get to the bottom of things and to see through the intellectual posturings and methodological errantry of those who routinely denigrate the intellectual capacity of black students and academics. He often described the academy as the last refuge of white male power, where white male professors still could lord it over their mostly black junior colleagues, with the witting or unwitting endorsement of a handful of acquiescent black academics who embrace hollowed out notions of Africanisation and decolonisation. As a senior black professor, Lovell experienced and analysed this South African curiosity up close. And his espousal of the cause of his junior black colleagues against their white seniors was a constant thorn in the side of those who benefited from the extant academic power relations. He was a harbinger of what is possible in the academy, indisputable proof that black academics suffer from no intellectual disabilities whatsoever, and a living reminder that the academic hegemony of white men could not last. He was obligated by his talents to presage an academy structured by the imperatives of the majority world and staffed, from top to bottom, by academics who are committed to the development and welfare of that world. He did not shirk that obligation.
Lovell stood tall as an unreconstructed radical, unapologetically living the principles in which he believed. He searched for truth and justice on an archaeological scale, and cared little about appearing to be the misfit black professor in a mostly white male professoriate. He cared even less about offending the racists, sexists and other miscreants bearing the supposedly superior affectations of WASP culture. Early on he had chosen a side, that of the South African masses, the millions of ordinary men and women who had to struggle day in and day out to keep body and soul together. And he had chosen a mission which was simple and singular: to devote his life to ensuring that, when he left it, the world was a better place than when he came into it. It was his dogged pursuit of this mission which made him a radical in all things. He had to become a subversive in order to do some good, he had to become a dissident in order to find the truth, and he had to be a non-conformist in order to achieve some justice. He had to sweep aside the platitudes and the pretences in order to get to the raw kernel of things. He did so both consistently and persistently, thereby exploding any notion that black women and men were incomplete human beings, destined to become hewers of wood and drawers of water. Thousands of his former students in South Africa and the rest of the continent provide living proof of the falsity of that most egregious of myths created and perpetuated by the intellectual ideologues of the minority world. Listen to one of his protégés speak:
I believe his soul [is resting] in eternal peace. He lived a peaceful life. He made the world a better place than he found it by being a good friend, a dedicated teacher, a committed Prof, a father … All these make him alive though dead. May his soul continue to rest in eternal peace.
We have all the reasons to be celebrating the gift of his life than mourning his death. He has accomplished his mission in this world. We need to collect pieces of our broken hearts, stand up and continue with our mission. We all need to make this world a better place than we found it, or else, our lives will be useless. Aluta Continua!
(Dr Zainabu Diwa, Judge of the High Court of Tanzania)
Here’s to Lovell Derek Fernandez, whose life’s work will continue to resonate with all good people and all fellow radicals well beyond his all too brief sojourn on this mortal coil!
Authors: BSC Martin & RA Koen
Editors: Law and Justice at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of Lovell Derek Fernandez (2016)