In my first year of law at the University of Cape Town, in 2009, I sat in the Wilfred and Jules Kramer lecture theatre 1, on Middle Campus, where law students are welcomed. That lecture theatre is where students spend most of their time during their three- or four-year journey through UCT's law programme, studying towards their LLB degree. It is where they have orientation, where most lectures are presented, and where they write big exams.The first day of a black student's LLB degree is also the last time they will be in a diverse group of students. By the time they graduate (if they graduate) they will be one of a few black faces in a sea of whiteness.Before I started I had been part of a diverse cohort of students in the faculty of humanities. The greater part of the law class was white, but I was not really surprised by the demographics: the majority of students in South Africa are white, and since university fees are only affordable for a handful of parents, the classrooms are desaturated further.For the majority of us, the black students, we were the first in our families not only to attend university but also to study law.We would be the first lawyers in our families: a prestigious title to hold.But the road to being a black law graduate at UCT is perilous. Slowly, from my first year, black faces started vanishing from classes, picked from the herd by expensive university fees, academic exclusion, or gradual loss of interest in the subject.Those who made it through each successive year had to face not only these factors but also the pressure of competing with their white counterparts, whose familial roots run deep within the South African legal dispensation.Some students' parents were judges, some had parents who were partners in the country's top law firms. It was commonplace for someone's advocate father or uncle to be name-dropped in classes.Black students could not claim such affinity. Our surnames did not appear on case notes or in jurisprudence. We would be "those black guys", who fomented arguments if a point of African customary law was unnecessarily attacked by an ignorant remark, or the ones who held up a class if we did not understand a particularly complex concept.But that was when we participated in class. For the greater part of my legal education the majority of black students were cowed into silence by our ignorance of the law.We remained silent in debates because we lacked the confidence it takes to challenge controversial points of law.This is because law in South Africa is predominantly white. The non-transformative classrooms in which law is taught, in which debates about race, politics and the impact of law on the country's past, present, and future should occur, are deprived when the melanin-deficient majority holds sway.These classrooms become the legal community, which remains blind to the need for transformation. More disturbingly, it remains a fraternity. A boys' club. A white boys' club.Black advocates and attorneys, many of whom have been protesting against the slow transformation of the legal profession in the past few weeks, are in the minority. Women are even rarer.In 2011 for example, UCT's law faculty contributed nine black law graduates to legal practice: 29 had enrolled in 2007 in a class of 67 students. Eight were excluded on academic grounds, six dropped out, despite being in good academic standing, and another six were busy with their undergraduate studies.The black graduation rate, therefore, was 31%. For whites it was 50%.The majority of graduates who would go on to fill the ranks of candidate attorneys and junior counsel around the country were predominantly white.If the legal community wants a diverse body of practitioners, it has to come to terms with the fact that white roots do not produce black flowers.Ngamije is an English and law graduate from the University of Cape Town, working as a writer, photographer and designer in Windhoek. More of his writing can be found on his website: www.remythequill.com..