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In this article, I focus on the narratives of two men, Patrick and Father Marko Mkandla. I ask whether their continued interactions with, and appeals to, Zimbabwe's politicized legal system were ‘foolish’. The two men inhabited different geographic regions and diverged in their economic positions, political engagement, and ties to Zimbabwe's human rights networks. They nonetheless both started their accounts by recollecting that they persisted in reporting cases of political violence to the Zimbabwe Republic Police. Their accounts show us that imagining, invoking and interacting with the law in Zimbabwe was often an ambiguous, occasionally dangerous, and very contradictory exercise. Under ZANU-PF's rule, judicial institutions were increasingly politicized as instruments for repression. The men nevertheless continued to interact with the state and its officials as if these were bound by rules. This allowed Patrick and Father Mkandla to perform their rights-based citizenship, to experience occasional ‘successes’, and to differentiate themselves from the ‘unprofessional’ politicized civil servants they encountered during their appeals. Rather than ‘foolishly’ invoking the law, some Zimbabwean citizens engaged it as a shared language through which they could articulate their imagination of, hopes for, and belonging to a rule-bound state in the future.

Through a focus on land cases, this chapter looks at the place of law and the judicial system in Zimbabwean politics. To contextualize the understandings, imaginations, and invocations of law that emerged in contestations over land in the courts after 2000, the chapter first situates the law historically to examine the judicial culture that emerged from the interplay of law’s repressive and reformative roles under Rhodesian rule. It shows that under colonial rule the tensions between judicial officers’ commitment to formalism on the one hand and their efforts to deliver ‘substantive justice’ on the other, shaped the legal cultures that carried over into the post-colonial era. In response to growing opposition in the late 1990s, ZANU-PF emphasized a narrow retelling of liberation war history and turned to land for political currency. When land reform was challenged through the courts, ZANU-PF drew on its understanding of history to frame its land policies as both ensuring ‘justice’ for colonial land alienation and protecting the ‘sovereignty’ of the Zimbabwean nation. In this manner, challenges to the government’s land policies were cast as ‘unjust’. Certain legal and political actors, however, contested ZANU-PF’s interpretation of ‘justice’ by drawing attention to the judiciary’s historical commitment to ‘substantive justice’. Through public debates over whose justice the law ought to protect, the law continued to be central to state authority.

This article analyzes how state power and authority were established and critiqued through the performative, material, and sensory characteristics of Harare's Criminal Magistrates’ Courts in Zimbabwe. Drawing on courtroom observations and interviews conducted with human rights lawyers and their clients between 2010 and 2018, this article shows how Zimbabwe's deteriorating political and economic situation after 2000 caused a decline of the material conditions in court. Lawyers and their clients played on this decline to emphasize how the state failed to display its authority. Simultaneously, these material conditions highlighted the ruling party's (ZANU‐PF) preoccupation with law's coercive rather than legitimating utility. A focus on material attributes, however, does not suffice in examining the ways in which court proceedings impose and challenge the authority of the law and of the state. The sensory dimensions of courtrooms also require attention. Within the courtroom, it was vital for actors to engage the visual, auditory, and—importantly—the olfactory reminders of the horrific conditions in police detention and prison. By doing so, lawyers and their clients reasserted and questioned not only the authority of law but also the control certain state actors exerted on and over the bodies and emotions of Zimbabwean citizens within legal spaces.

In this article, I examine the shifting language of debates over law and justice in Zimbabwe in the run-up to, and following, the November 2017 coup. I argue that the rhetoric Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF) drew upon to secure its authority and negotiate legitimacy through law, shifted from a focus of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘protection’, to one of battling ‘corruption’ and ‘criminality’. At the same time, there remained a consistency in the manner that the legal system was used to target a select part of the country’s population, those opposed to ZANU–PF and its vision for the future.