Land, Law, and the Courts in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Abstract 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.