1 LAW AND ACCESS TO JUSTICE: THE RHETORIC AND THE REALITY Issa G. Shivji I. INTRODUCTION When I received the invitation from good young friends of Kituo cha Katiba in Kampala, to make a presentation at this regional conference, my first thoughts were to decline politely. I did not wish to attend another conference, write another academic paper on a theme which has been sufficiently discussed, sufficiently conferenced on and sufficiently written upon by academics, including myself. Yet inside me I felt the fire and anger to say, to talk and to converse passionately on my, over three decades of, real flesh-and-blood experiences at the podiums of teaching, where justice is supposedly theorized upon, and at the bar of courts, where justice is supposedly dispensed by the practitioners of that great, old, noble profession - The Law. My real experiences run counter to these suppositions, particularly the experiences of the last post-cold war decade. Those flesh-and-blood victims of injustice in search of justice, whom I represent in courts and where I meet the gentlemen of the bar and the bench, tell me very different stories about the "noble profession". I felt it is these stories that need to be felt, told, understood and theorized upon. I must make one thing clear. My experiences are local and parochial, in and about Tanzania. I make no pretence about their representative character nor do I lay any claim to generalizations of continental or epochal proportions. Yet I have no hesitation in saying that many of these experiences have echoes and parallels in the East African region, if not the whole of Africa - notwithstanding differences in flavour and nuance. I make this explicit in advance and plead "guilty" in anticipation to a charge by global intellectuals of ghettoizing scholarship and learning. Once upon a time, activist intellectuals used to say: "Think globally, act locally". I do not know what global intellectuals say on that score these days. But I know that these days they are sermonizing to us to give up both thinking and acting. And that is exactly what I am angry about and agonizing over in this paper in the context of the experience in Tanzania. If that is ghettoizing scholarship, so be it. I have written the paper in an unconventional manner. Section I starts with a real life anecdote of a legal aid matter I prosecuted some twenty years ago as a newly enrolled young advocate. I can now tell, with the wisdom of a lot more cases that I have done since, that I could have picked on virtually any case and arrived at virtually the same conclusions. It is typical, representative and fulsome, apply, if you will, any test that you may, of random sampling and statistical tabulation. Real-life injustice is not as complex to recognize as the pundits make it out to be, nor do you need your computer to click 51% of incidence of injustice before you can say it is prevalent in our society. Section II, with more illustrations and anecdotes, draws lessons as to the actually