The Coloniality of African Law: Legality, Legitimacy, and the Structural Reproduction of Power

Abstract African states are formally constitutional democracies. Virtually all possess bills of rights, ratified human rights treaties, multi-party electoral systems, and judiciaries empowered to review executive action. Yet for the majority of African citizens, these architectures produce structured domination rather than emancipation. This article argues that conventional explanations - institutional weakness, democratic immaturity, enforcement deficits - cannot account for the depth or durability of this paradox. What is required is a reckoning with the coloniality of law: the persistence of colonial legal logics, institutional architectures, and epistemological hierarchies within ostensibly independent African legal orders. Drawing on decolonial theory, critical legal studies, and African jurisprudence, and developing an extended case study of Cameroon alongside comparative analysis of Uganda and Ethiopia, the article demonstrates how colonial legal structures produce authoritarianism through legality, rendering rights textually present but structurally unavailable. The framework integrates a systematic gendered analysis: colonial legal epistemology co-constitutes racial and gender hierarchies, and the coloniality of law reproduces both through professional habitus and doctrinal architecture.