This part is in four sections. The first (chapter 11) describes the unfolding parameters of white discourses about Native Law after the conquest of Natal and the Eastern Cape and the extension of colonial administration over large African populations. The second (chapter 12) considers how these discourses developed after Union in the context of the search for the ‘solution to the Native Question’ and the movement towards segregation. The third (chapter 13) turns towards the ways in which African Law was actually developed in the state's Native Courts in Natal and the Transkei during these years, and illustrates the interplay between the broader discourses on Native Law; the Roman-Dutch law; and the development of the legal doctrines of the Native Law. Finally (chapter 14) I consider the position after 1927, bringing together the politics of segregation and the doctrinal development of Native Law in the New Native Appeal Courts. The account is a temporal narrative, rather than an analytic treatment of legal categories, in order to place the unfolding doctrines of this law within its intellectual, political and institutional contexts.

Creating the discourse

In the years covered in this book two new bodies of systematised common law were developed in South Africa. While the Roman-Dutch and African systems of law have been treated as separate and different their history was closely connected, and neither can be fully understood without the other (see Chanock 1995).