Literal ‘decolonisation’: Re-reading African International Legal Scholarship through the African novel By Christopher Gevers (Draft Chapter for von Bernstorff & Dann (eds), The Battle for International Law in the Decolonization Era) Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity….[W]e must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. They fought as best they could with the weapons they possessed at the time, and if their struggle did not reverberate throughout the international arena, the reason should be attributed not so much to a lack of heroism but to a fundamentally different international situation. Fanon, ‘On National Culture’, The Wretched of the Earth (1959). I. Introduction The opening lines of Fanon’s 1959 essay are an instructive place to begin this Chapter on decolonisation and African international legal scholarship for a number of reasons. First, they suggest an ethics of reading the ‘efforts of …forefathers’ – that is, sympathetically but not uncritically (as Fanon himself proceeded to demonstrate in the essay) – one that this chapter takes up in respect of the scholarly efforts of African international lawyers during ‘decolonisation’ (i.e. 1955-1975). Second, Fanon calls attention to the need contextualize these efforts – including their apparent ‘silence or passiveness’ – in order to take into account both the ‘weapons … possessed at the time’ and the prevailing ‘international situation’; an attentiveness to context that similarly informs this Chapter. Third, central to Fanon’s sympathetic critique of ‘colonized intellectuals’ (i.e. writers, artists, poets) was their problematic use of ‘techniques and a language borrowed from the occupier’ 1 – or colonial forms – a critique taken up by Ngugi’s wa Thiongo and extended here to the relationship between African international lawyers and their own colonial form (i.e. international law). Finally, Fanon’s essay was provoked by the 1959 ‘Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists’ in Rome, which in turn inspired the 1962 ‘Conference of African Writers of English Expression’ in Makarere – an event that is central to the re-reading of African international legal scholarship proposed in this Chapter. With these opening remarks, the Chapter will proceed as follows: Section II will briefly set out the reading of African international legal scholarship which divides it into two ‘streams’ – 1 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 160.