Introduction
This interview was conducted during a conference hosted by the Chair of African Legal Studies (26 – 28 November 2025) at the University of Bayreuth, marking the culmination of the four-year research project “Intractable Problems of Human Rights”, which particularly focused on the issues of child labour, LGBTIQ+ and Human Trafficking on the African continent. The event gathered leading voices from law and related disciplines to grapple with some of the most persistent dilemmas in contemporary human rights research and to explore new intellectual horizons.
Among the invited contributors was Grace A. Musila, an Associate Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, whose work has long explored the power of narrative in shaping political and legal imaginaries. At the moment, she is a research fellow at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Study, at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany. The interview aimed to sketch out impressions from the “Intractable Problems of Human Rights Conference” and was conducted by Merlin Mitschker, a current PhD candidate at the Chair of African Legal Studies.
What follows is a conversation that moves between literature and law, asking how stories contour our understanding of human rights, how narrative insight can expose blind spots in legal reasoning.
ALS Blog: Today I am talking to Grace A Musila. Would you like to introduce yourself, what you are doing at the moment, and how you got in touch with the Chair of African Legal Studies?
Grace A. Musila (GM) Thank you, Merlin. My name is Grace A. Musila and I am a literary scholar. I teach and research African literature — primarily Anglophone African literature — as well as African popular culture, at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I am based in the Department of African Literature.
My teaching and research are anchored in literary studies, but I came to participate in the workshop with the African Legal Studies programme because I serve on the board of the Africa Multiple Cluster. Through that, I have been to Bayreuth several times for conferences, meetings, and events, and it is through those visits that I got to meet Prof. Thoko Kaime and learn about the work of the Chair.
When he organized this workshop — closing a previous project but also looking ahead to African Legal Studies’ future agenda — he invited academics working in law as well as scholars from outside the legal field. That’s how I came to join the workshop and think together about the question of law and belonging, which may become one of the topics Prof Kaime and his team, including the student researchers, pursue next.
ALS Blog: Thank you for wrapping this up for us. The event was the final project meeting of the Intractable Problems of Human Rights project that the Chair of African Legal Studies conducted together with various partners. When we look back at the issues addressed —child labour, LGBTIQ+ rights, and human trafficking — how would you say your discipline, which is quite different from law, can enrich the legal discipline when it searches for solutions to these intractable problems?
GM: The beauty of African literature is that it uses narrative and imagination to make sense of the world and to grapple with the questions societies face. As a literary scholar, I come to conversations that you lawyers are having about human rights through the lens of how literary studies reflects on these issues.
We see this, for example, in fiction that deals with human trafficking, or in the field of queer African studies, which examines narratives around queer experiences. One of Nigeria’s best-known writers, Chinua Achebe, puts it beautifully when he says that fiction lends us a second handle on reality. Through fiction, we gain another way of understanding lived experiences which we may note necessarily have experienced ourselves; but also, even if we have experience them, literature lends us a second handle, an alternative way, of making sense of these experiences.
Even though literature is imaginative, or made up, it allows us to analyse difficult human rights questions and to imagine solutions. It also gives readers who have not lived a particular experience, whether that is being part of a minoritized sexual orientation or being subjected to trafficking – a way to understand what those experiences might look and feel like.
So literature gives us tools to analyse society, to think through human psychology and subjectivities, as well as the stuctures that advance or undermine full humanity, and to ask: Why do certain human rights problems persist? Why, for instance, have we not resolvedthe question of child labour? Why does a country like South Africa, with a progressive, queer-affirming consistution, still have high rates of homophobic violence? Literature allows us to approach these questions through the work of the imagination.
ALS Blog: So, one takeaway already is that human rights scholars — and perhaps not only human rights scholars — should feel encouraged to read novels or literature in the field they research, in order to gain a deeper and broader understanding of lived realities.
GM: Yes, absolutely. When we watched Dr Gift Mauluka’s documentary Beyond the Law and his presentation from his doctoral research on child labour in Malawi,from a legal studies perspective, I actually told him afterwards that my first encounter with the issue of child labour was through a poem we studied in school as teenagers. It is called A Freedom Song by the Kenyan poet Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye.The poem traces the life of a young girl, Atieno, who is handed over by her poor family to wealthy relatives and becomes a domestic worker for them. Their children go to school, but she stays home to work. In just seven short stanzas, the poem follows her from arriving in that household to her death as a teenage mother a few years later— a stark portrayal of the violence of child labour in domestic work.
So, when I listened to Dr Mauluka’s legal analysis, I could access what he was discussing through poetry—because that was my first introduction to the topic. I think we can learn a lot from each other: if lawyers engaged more with literature, we could tap into each other’s ways of making sense of the world.
ALS Blog: When you listened to colleagues from the legal field over the past days, are there things you would criticize — or perhaps be frustrated by— about how human rights lawyers approach these issues?
GM: I would not call it criticism, but as a lay person, I do feel a frustration with the gap between excellent laws and people’s lived realities. Human rights laws are powerful instruments; many are thoughtfully crafted to protect and uphold rights.
But the challenge is the gap between those laws and life on the ground. The example that comes to mind, because I live in South Africa, is the rights of the LGBTQ+ community. The South African Constitution is very clear in its protections, yet we still face high rates of hate crime and homophobia.
The same applies to rights to water, education, and healthcare. These rights exist in law, but in practice we see the commodification and privatization of basic necessities. The same applies to environmental laws. We have laws about mining companies restoring the environment once they completet their operations for instance, but this doesn’t seem to happen; hence the related problem of so-called illegal mining, as well acid mine drainage issues, in South Africa. So the question becomes: How do you reconcile legal protections with these lived contradictions?
This came up at the conference, too – the idea that the law sometimes protects liberal rights while simultaneously upholding the demands of capital. And capital can work against rights.
So, my frustration is not with lawyers specifically, but with the gap between law and implementation. How do we breathe life into these beautiful laws, such as the South African Constitution? How do we ensure they do not remain words on paper? Having the law matters – especially when many African countries still criminalise queer sexuality – but the next step is ensuring those protections are lived realities.
ALS Blog: Thank you for these insights. I have another question: If we switch perspectives – what do you feel you can take from human rights lawyers and apply to your work in literature?
GM: There are branches of literary studies that examine the relationship between law and literature. We have excellent scholars working in that intersection. For example, Stephen Morton has a book States of Emergency: Colonialism, Literature and Law – where he examines settler-colonial societies, in this case Algeria and Kenya, and looks at the “state of emergency” as a legal tool that enabled colonial abuses. He then engages literature through these legal debates.
In South Africa, the question of land often pivots around the 1913 Natives Land Act, and the writer and scholar Sol Plaatje addressed it directly in his book, Native Life in South Africa. So literature and law are already in conversation. We also have the field of human rights literature, which draws on legal debates to analyse literary interventions around rights – a classic in this regard is Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights Inc. – The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law (2007) which should be required reading for Human Rights law students, I think.
Beyond that, I am personally interested in political processes like commissions of inquiry across the continent. Because I work on narrative and imagination, I find commissions of inquiry fascinating—they often unfold like theatre. There is a staging of testimony, of narrative arcs, of characters, and the weaving together of evidence to tell or suppress a particular narrative perspective, or way of making meaning.
South Africa recently had the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Allegations of State Capture (popularly known as the Zondo Commission on state capture), and now currently ongoing is the Judicial Commission of Inquiry into Criminality, Political Interference and Corruption in the Criminal Justice System (popularly known as the Madlanga Commission). When I watch these processes, I see them as narratives: witnesses telling stories, structuring their evidence, foregrounding certain elements and downplaying others. Legal testimony is storytelling.
So yes – one can apply literary analysis to such processes. I would love to see a full literary reading of commissions of inquiry someday – whether by me, if I find the time 🙂 — or by someone else.
ALS Blog: Maybe one of our readers will be inspired to apply exactly this method.
GM: I hope so!
ALS Blog: I am really grateful that you took the time for this interview.
GM: Thank you, thank you so much.
