Lawyers’ ethics in Anglophone Africa: ex Africa semper aliquid novi

This article offers a snapshot of the current regulatory and educational landscape relating to lawyers' ethics in three Anglophone African jurisdictions: South Africa, Uganda and Zimbabwe. It first surveys the politico-legal contexts and the statutory bodies responsible for regulating the profession and post-LLB training, highlighting systemic weaknesses, resource and institutional constraints that undermine effective accountability and public protection. It then maps the state of legal ethics education, noting the limited or uneven presence of ethics in undergraduate curricula, the need to update key outdated teaching materials, and the fragmented relationship between universities, regulators and the organised profession. Against this background of regulatory and pedagogical concern, the article turns to emerging African scholarship that seeks to “Africanise” legal ethics and reimagine lawyering through relational values such as Ubuntu, rather than Western models of liberal individualism. Drawing on this work, the article argues that, although the landscape remains contested and fragile, new normative frameworks grounded in indigenous moral philosophy justify cautious optimism about the future of lawyers' ethics and justice-oriented lawyering in Africa, while also offering potential insights for other jurisdictions.