In the years after independence, former British colonies in eastern and southern Africa struggled to fill the ranks of their judiciaries with African judges. Beginning in the mid-1960s, states including Uganda, Tanzania, and Botswana solved this problem by retaining judges from the Caribbean and West Africa, especially Nigeria. In this same period, a wave of coups brought many independent states under the rule of their militaries (or authoritarian civilian regimes). Foreign judges who had been appointed in the name of pan-African cooperation were tasked with interpreting the laws that soldiers imposed, and assessing the legitimacy of regimes born of coups. The decisions they rendered usually accommodated authoritarianism, but they could also be turned against it. To understand how colonial law and postcolonial solidarities shaped Africa's military dictatorships, this article focuses on one judge, Sir Egbert Udo Udoma of Nigeria, who served as Uganda's first African chief justice and was an influential member of the Nigerian Supreme Court. Udoma and other judges like him traversed the continent in the name of African cooperation, making a new body of jurisprudence as they did so. Their rulings were portable, and they came to underpin military rule in many states, both in Africa and in the wider Commonwealth.

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便携式政变：乌干达和尼日利亚“革命”的法理学

在独立后的几年里，东非和南部非洲的前英国殖民地努力让非洲法官填补他们的司法队伍。从 1960 年代中期开始，乌干达、坦桑尼亚和博茨瓦纳等国家通过保留加勒比和西非，特别是尼日利亚的法官解决了这个问题。在同一时期，一波政变将许多独立国家置于其军队（或威权文职政权）的统治之下。以泛非合作的名义任命的外国法官的任务是解释士兵实施的法律，并评估政变产生的政权的合法性。他们做出的决定通常适应威权主义，但他们也可能反对它。了解殖民法和后殖民团结如何塑造非洲' 在军事独裁统治下，本文重点关注一位法官，尼日利亚的埃格伯特·乌多·乌多马爵士，他曾担任乌干达第一位非洲首席大法官，并且是尼日利亚最高法院的有影响力的成员。乌多马和其他像他一样的法官以非洲合作的名义横穿非洲大陆，在他们这样做的同时形成了一个新的法理学体系。他们的裁决是可移植的，它们成为非洲和更广泛的英联邦许多州的军事统治的基础。