Performing Power in Zimbabwe
Politics, Law, and the Courts since 2000

Challenges depictions of law as a façade for political repression by examining political trials in Zimbabwe after 2000.

Susanne Verheul (Author)

9781009011792, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 March 2023

286 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.42 kg

'A fascinating and vividly painted picture of the way in which power gets enacted in Zimbabwe's courtrooms and a must-read for socio-legal scholars and Africanists alike. Verheul manages to combine disciplinary perspectives and rich case material to dig deep into how power gets constituted and is performed. Highly recommended!' Barbara Oomen, Utrecht University

Focusing on political trials in Zimbabwe's Magistrates' Courts between 2000 and 2012, Susanne Verheul explores why the judiciary have remained a central site of contestation in post-independence Zimbabwe. Drawing on rich court observations and in-depth interviews, this book foregrounds law's potential to reproduce or transform social and political power through the narrative, material, and sensory dimensions of courtroom performances. Instead of viewing appeals to law as acts of resistance by marginalised orders for inclusion in dominant modes of rule, Susanne Verheul argues that it was not recognition by but of this formal, rule-bound ordering, and the form of citizenship it stood for, that was at stake in performative legal engagements. In this manner, law was much more than a mere instrument. Law was a site in which competing conceptions of political authority were given expression, and in which people's understandings of themselves as citizens were formed and performed.

Introduction: Law, state authority and the courts, 1. History, authority and the law in Zimbabwe, 1950–2002
2. 'Rebels' and 'good boys': examining the working conditions in Zimbabwe's attorney general's office after 2000
3. 'Zimbabweans are foolishly litigious': debating citizenship when engaging with a politicised legal system
4. 'What is abnormal is normal': performative politics on the stages of arrest and detention
5. Material and sensory courtrooms: observing the 'decline of professionalism' in Harare's magistrates'' courts
6. The trials of the 'traitor in Harare's magistrates' courts under the unity government
7. History, consciousness and citizenship in Matabeleland: the impact of the MLF case
8. Historical narrative and political strategy in Bulawayo's magistrates' courts: the case of Owen Maseko
Conclusion: 'Government is a legal fiction' – performing law, the state, citizenship and politics.

Subject Areas: Legal system: general [LNA], Legal history [LAZ], Political structure & processes [JPH], African history [HBJH]