About Me

Hello; I am Anthony C. Diala. Welcome to my professional portfolio. I’ve kept this introduction brief so that you can move quickly to the juicy part – my teaching story. 

I joined the Department of Private Law as a senior lecturer on 6 August 2018. At undergraduate level, I have convened or co-convened Legal and Cultural Pluralism (LPL 431), a 4th year elective, African Customary Law (CUS 121 and CUS 311), a compulsory module. In 2020, I co-convened Muslim Personal Law, a 4th year elective. At postgraduate level, I convene the interdisciplinary Master of Laws in Legal Pluralism and Family Law, whose core module is Legal and Cultural Pluralism (CLL 816). Also, I guest lecture Gender Equality and Women’s Rights (CLL 815).

I have over twenty years of graduate experience in research and teaching spanning twenty-one countries across four continents. I am the first Ph.D. graduate in the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) Chair in Customary Law, Indigenous Values, and Human Rights at the University of Cape Town (UCT). Other degrees include an LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa from the University of Pretoria (2007), a diploma in French from Makerere University, Uganda (2007), a postgraduate diploma from the Nigerian Law School, Abuja (2004), and an LLB from Enugu State University (2002). Aside academia, my work experience spans the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, Uganda, and the Justice and Peace Commission, Nigeria. 

I am an NRF rated researcher with specialisation in legal pluralism, human rights, and comparative law. I have held teaching and research positions in Germany, Italy, Nigeria, Sweden, South Africa, and Somaliland. For example, from 2022 to 2023, I convened the Master of Arts in Law and Society in Africa as a Visiting Professor at the University of Turin, Italy. In Spring 2023, I convened Human Rights in Africa at the University of Bayreuth in Germany.

I have won competitive grants from the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council of New York, the Nordic Africa Institute, the German Academic Exchange Service, and South Africa’s National Research Foundation. My research presents an innovative concept of adaptive legal pluralism as the lens for understanding the relationship between African customary laws and imperially transplanted state laws in post-colonial societies. I edit the African Journal of Legal Studies and sit on the editorial boards of the Journal of African Law and Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis [formerly the Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law]. 

MY teaching story

An innate desire

From childhood, I wanted to be a teacher, even though I did not know how profoundly I wanted it for the first few years after I graduated from the university. My inability to recognise teaching as my calling is not surprising. As eager law students on the cusp of the third millennium, we were not really expected to choose teaching as a profession. As far as our struggling families were concerned, life after studies was (hopefully) lucrative law practice in a government ministry or a law firm. Anyway, my innate desire to become a teacher was shaped by my mother, who was a teacher in our village school, as well as by three of my teachers in the high school and the university. I will describe the three one after the other, as each of them had unique influences on my impressionable mind.

My Christian Religious Studies teacher in high school had a flamboyant style of teaching that bowled many students over. He was a politician of some sort and he brought an unrivalled panache to his teaching. He also had an intriguing air of eccentricity. For example, he would sometimes begin teaching from the corridor before entering the classroom! That way, he ensured that he always engaged us during his classes. We were even more impressed by his ability to dictate notes for close to an hour on memory alone, reeling out bible passages like confetti. I suppose I picked up aspects of this trait, for I love to deliver lectures without relying on notes or power point presentations.

My Jurisprudence lecturer in Enugu State University, Dr Obi Ogene, had recently returned with a doctorate from a university in the United States of America. Obviously, he had a broader worldview than many of his colleagues. This advantage helped his lecture delivery, which was immersed in multi-disciplinary stories from across the world. Above all, he had unmatchable classroom presence. Every serious student eagerly anticipated his lectures. I remember how, one day, after a particularly stirring lecture, I wrote a letter to my father begging him to send me to the USA after my LLB. Having visited seventeen countries across four continents, I have realised that I acquired my wanderlust and interdisciplinary approach from Dr Ogene's influence.

My Law of Evidence teacher in law school was a charmer. Kind and thoughtful, he had a simple, engaging style filled with colourful stories that held many of us spellbound. This man really made learning look easy with his remarkable knack for simplifying difficult concepts. From him, I learned pastoral teaching and superb classroom presence – that is ability to hold an audience in rapt attention. He was an unconscious influence in my decision to abandon law practice for academia. But first, let me tell you why I began my career with law practice.

Changing the world; changing myself

Like some of my classmates who got pumped up by our lecturers’ passion for social justice, I wanted to change the world. Long before we received our glossy attorney certificates declaring our admission to the coveted Nigerian Bar, I had resolved to work on ensuring justice for people forced to live on the margins of society. I genuinely believed I could change the world. So, immediately after law school, I went to work for the Justice and Peace Commission (JDPC-CARITAS), a non-profit organisation that, among others, had a nascent legal aid component. In the two years I spent as their Human Rights Programme Officer, I carried out some of the most fulfilling activities of my life. In sum, I provided legal aid for over a hundred detainees, organised numerous alternative dispute resolutions, raised funds, produced a human rights handbook, founded a newspaper column on human rights, and conducted an unprecedented wave of workshops, lectures and seminars for 11 civil society groups, 21 high schools and four tertiary institutions. I was living my dream.

However, dreams rarely last. I realised I was not changing the world – at least not as visibly as I had imagined it when I was in law school. Moreover, my naive belief in the efficacy of the law was shattered within a few months of legal practice. I was confronted with corrupt public officials and, heartbreakingly, former prison inmates ostracised by their own families.

My worst challenge was dealing with poverty – the type that drives some inmates to commit a crime soon after they are released, just to return to the guarantee of food in the prison. Gradually, I became depressed. Although I found great satisfaction from releasing dozens of detainees with creative interpretations of statutes, I felt I was pouring drops of water into the ocean. Eventually, I decided that the best way I could make a meaningful impact in and beyond the justice system was from the top of public service. I resolved to empower myself with postgraduate studies.

Return to school

Soon after scouring for scholarships, I got accepted into the prestigious Master of Laws in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa (LLM/HRDA) at the University of Pretoria. Thus, I was back in school three years after leaving it. Although the LLM/HRDA maintained my desire to change the world, it also acquainted me with a realistic view of the world. I learned of the interlinked ways in which corruption, poverty and unemployment prompt, prop and promote injustice. Immediately after my graduation, I interned at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR).

At the ICTR, I became acquainted with atrocities so grave that they questioned my assumptions about the efficacy of law. Fortunately, there was a professional staff counselling unit to assist me – unlike at JDPC-CARITAS where I dealt with my 'demons' alone. 

From the ICTR, I went to work at the International Criminal Court (ICC). I was assigned to the Thomas Lubanga trial as part of (then) Deputy Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda’s team. Later, I served as evidence reviewer in the Darfur Situation. Ultimately, the ICC was worse than the ICTR for my desire to redress injustice.

At the ICC, I found prosecutors seemingly at peace with unspeakable human rights violations. It seemed to my idealistic mind that they had gotten used to misery. This, I could not accept. Unfortunately, my outspoken views were not popular [I eventually wrote a critical article on the Thomas Lubanga case as soon as I left the ICC]. When my contract was up for renewal, my team members were not supportive. But by then, I had realised that the only way I could contribute meaningfully to a just world was to bring up a new generation of scholars who are alert to their social responsibilities. Only the classroom offered me a platform for realising this desire. So, in September 2009, I left the ICC for Madonna University in Nigeria. 

There, I introduced Human Rights (initially as an elective), and co-convened International Law and Legal Systems. Academics are usually encouraged to obtain a doctorate. Accordingly, after a few years of searching for funding, I enrolled at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2013. The following year, I began teaching African Law and Common Law at UCT as compulsory modules for the new LLM in Comparative Law in Africa. For four years, I taught these modules for multicultural classes of local and exchange students from Europe until I joined UWC in 2018.

By now, you should have a sense of my teaching motivation. This motivation informs my teaching philosophy, which I explain in the next page …