Abezimu/Badimo (ancestors) and copyright law: from the Decolonial Turn to the pluriversal author

Sindane, Ntando

Abezimu/Badimo (ancestors) and copyright law: from the Decolonial Turn to the pluriversal author

Thesis / Dissertation

2024

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Commercial Law

Faculty

Faculty of Law

Abstract

"A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism” is the sentence that opens Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engels' iconic text, The Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels set out what was to become the primary program of action for all communist parties in Europe. The Communist Manifesto's cardinal observation was that Communism was an epochal inevitability, and that it was the task of all revolutionaries to ensure that conditions are befitting for a Communist reality. Although in a completely different context, this thesis accepts that the spectre that is currently haunting Africa and the Global South is that of Decoloniality and Decolonisation. This thesis studiedly perceives the #MustFall moment as one that presented South Africa with a Decolonial Turn – this is an epochal inevitability that seeks to complete the incomplete task of decolonising society. To respond to the Decolonial Turn, this thesis methodologically employs decolonial theory, Black consciousness philosophy and Black Marxism to study the essence of copyright law's authorship from the perspective of people on the other side of Western modernity. The basic contention of this thesis, and its original contribution to the corpus of literature as regards authorship in copyright, is that the logical aftermath of the Decolonial Turn leads to a “pluriversal author” – this is a type of author that is reflective of the pluriversal epistemic and ontological patterns of a decolonised world. This is a world where many worlds exist. One of those worlds is inhabited by people whose epistemic traditions suggest that an author in copyright is inclusive of “Abezimu/Badimo”, that is the non-human author who is represented in an onto-triadic edifice of Being; the living, the dead and the yet-to-be-born. The thesis that is defended in this doctoral project is that Abezimu/Badimo are an author in copyright, and that this ought to be accepted, embraced, and reflected in prevailing copyright law legislative frameworks.

Keywords

Commercial Law

Reference:

Collections

PhD / Doctoral

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