ABSTRACT
The chapter attends to multiple senses of what it is to be African in the expression African legal ethics. In modern history Europeans created a sense of being African that served their global colonial interest. From an African point of view, this distorts how Africans view themselves. Africans were projected as black or as negroes. Africans, it is pointed out are what they were: Africans. Hence, their authentic legal ethics had to be African African ethics, not black or negro legal ethics. This calls for a deracialization of the thinking of their legal ethics, for re-Africanization of their legal ethics. Such an ethics is not genetically rooted. It is socially and culturally constructed as is the case with every other legal ethics. Law and ethics are means of ongoing self-construction. One of the objectives of legal ethics, it is argued, is to secure and promote this process. It is what underlies the determination of what to do or what not to do in legal ethics.
