Book Review

A good deal of the paperwork on which the apartheid regime rested was destroyed on the eve of democracy in 1994. But much of it was also left intact, bequeathing to current researchers a truncated but still promising trove of archival records. These documents promise to illuminate not only the inner springs of apartheid's faceless bureaucracies, but also the human constitution and proclivities of the mortals who staffed the remorseless juggernaut. Lobban's book makes ample use of these documents and, by design, straddles the interface of the faceless and the human. Although it is concerned with the logic and functioning of the judicial system in a particularly brutal stage of South Africa's political history—the 1970s, when a cohesive Black Consciousness (BC) movement emerged to challenge an ever more violent state—Lobban's study attaches greater weight to the social context that shaped the personal biases and predilections of the white judges who presided over political trials. Lobban's readable book therefore focuses on the important but hitherto neglected arena of the trial court in the apartheid era and also engages the broader issue about how the apartheid judicial system as a whole should be assessed.	1
Lobban argues that the political trials of the 1970s constitute a unique period in South Africa's racial struggle. Unlike other epochs, courtroom clashes between BC activists and the state did not center around disputes about alleged transgressions of actual laws or about the empirical evidence adduced in court. Normally the organizing concerns of trials, these issues received only episodic emphasis in the political trials of the 1970s. Instead, these trials were a battle over "pure" ideas (252) as judges struggled to comprehend the uncompromising extent to which black activists rejected racial supremacy. Because the totalitarian conditions that prevailed in South Africa after the Sharpeville massacre deprived regime opponents of institutional avenues to express their rejection of the state, the trial room became the only forum in which judges could systematically and directly acquaint themselves with the ideological principles of BC, the black areas that had nurtured BC ideology in the late 1960s being as familiar to judges as the dark side of the moon. Judges were accordingly transfixed by the discursive architecture of a BC ideology that may as well have been extraterrestrial. They riveted attention not on the actions of the accused but on the nooks and crannies and epistemological presuppositions of the BC weltanschauung. Thus, if the security police unlocked the secrets of BC by breaking the bodies of blacks, the more courtly judge did his bit for apartheid justice by unlocking the recesses of the BC mind. And this, Lobban argues compellingly, was what the political trials of the 1970s were all about.	2
Lobban's central claim, therefore, is that the trials of the 1970s signified that the state and black civil society were locked in a battle over the dissemination of ideologies. As such, these were "'pure' trials of ideas" (252): only in the 1980s would the legal focus shift from discursive claims and return more consistently to matters of actual transgressions and the quality of evidence adduced in trials. This claim foregrounds another central argument in White Man's Justice. Because matters of actual transgressions and evidence receded into the background, courtroom explanations of BC ideology were filtered through and assessed in light of the presiding judge's personal predilections and "fundamental assumptions" about the world. These "fundamental assumptions" were generally nurtured in the leafy environs of white suburbia and ivory-tower law schools and honed thereafter by dutiful service within the apartheid legal system—in other words, not the ingredients for a propitious "meeting of the minds" between judge and accused. Applying logic that oscillated risibly between the pedantic and the pedestrian, white judges rendered their "fundamental assumptions" about the world into what they patently believed were legally "impartial" questions of discovery: Was it not obvious that all ethnic groups possessed "race pride"? What were the determinants of group identity? Did "thoughts" about violence not confirm that defendants were "revolutionaries"? Was the fact of oppression sufficient to justify rebellion? These murky interrogations and the convictions that generally—but not always—followed were "often more the product of white fears and beliefs than the result of concrete proofs of acts or intentions against the state." Most judges reasoned themselves into convicting defendants on the basis of "thoughts" that struck them as racially threatening (17).	3
Lobban's assessment about the trial court and the judge who presided over them is decidedly critical, but also does not really break new ground. Instead, it joins a sturdy array of texts that generally refrain from condemning the apartheid judicial system as little more than the handmaiden of apartheid policies. Like these, Lobban points to two basic contrary arguments. First, the National Party government made ignoble and ample but, for all that, also procedural use of a constitution that upheld the supremacy of the legislature over the judiciary and pointedly denied the courts the power of judicial review. "Liberal" judges were rightly reined in by this cardinal constitutional arrangement, especially when the government's predilection for tyrannical legal weapons turned the country into a virtual police state in the 1970s and 1980s. Second, Lobban also notes that judges were not so wedded to either white supremacy or the most narrow interpretations of the law that they always ruled in favor of the government. "Liberal"—or sometimes, simply humane—sensibilities were sufficiently strong to periodically pull the government up short in court, and even political defendants were sometimes acquitted on technical legal grounds.	4
A minor weakness of Lobban's book is that it emphasizes the "fundamental assumptions" and "personal predilections" of trial court judges without examining their socialization, education, training, and career trajectories. An analysis that directs attention to the importance of the personal element in the judicial arena would have been enlivened and strengthened by a few revealing glimpses into the personal lives and professional development of judges. Without a few colorful snippets, all the reader has to fall back on to appreciate the predilections of individual judges (and state prosecutors) are the poisoned questions they flung at bemused defendants. But this is a minor complaint about what remains an excellent study.	5
Ivan Evans University of California, San Diego

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