When I first thought of writing this book towards the end of the 1980s the apartheid regime in South Africa was in a state of violent disintegration. The state itself had become increasingly ‘lawless’ and the courts had become arenas for political theatre. In the face of state lawlessness there was much anxiety among lawyers who looked both forward towards an ideal future for law and justice in a democratic state and backwards towards an idealised version of what South Africa's law had been like before its corruption by the apartheid and the security state. It seemed to me, though, that there was little on which to base an understanding of South Africa's legal past that could consider the law on anything but its own terms as a body of authoritative doctrine, a story which usually concentrated heavily on the history of the unique development of the white private law. Indeed texts and courses that treated legal history placed South Africa's legal past in Rome and Renaissance Europe rather than in European law's encounter with Africa and with the context of the rule of white over African which was the overriding factor in the development of the legal system. My first aim, therefore, was to try to situate an account of South Africa's legal history firmly within this local context, and to try to provide the beginnings of a re-mapping and the indication of a new archive for the interpretation of South African law.