Unwritten, Unheard: Gender, Orality, and the Colonial Making of Customary Law

Angikho is a poetry collection that interrogates the colonial distortion and contemporary marginalisation of African customary law, centring the lived experiences of Black African women. Drawing on African oral traditions, song, metaphor, praise poetry, and storytelling, the collection positions poetry as both a legal archive and a pedagogical tool. The poems explore how customary law, once flexible and community-centred, has been ossified through colonial and apartheid legal frameworks that privilege written positivism while silencing women’s voices in matters of land, inheritance, succession, and belonging. Through Umkhandlo Wabafazi, the collection exposes the procedural injustice that excludes women from speaking in legal processes that govern their lives. Yim Lo resists the epistemic violence of codification, asserting orality, memory, and lived experience as legitimate sources of legal authority. My Birthright (Part 2) engages spatial and spiritual displacement, using the metaphor of a failed GPS to critique modern legal and technological systems that cannot recognise ancestral ties to land. Collectively, these poems challenge the false dichotomies between law and poetry, written and oral, modernity and tradition. They reclaim African epistemologies as dynamic, intellectual, and legally meaningful traditions. *Angikho* ultimately advances poetry as resistance, memory, and method. insisting that African ways of knowing are not merely cultural artefacts, but authoritative frameworks for justice, governance, and belonging.