3 - ‘Zimbabweans Are Foolishly Litigious’

Summary

Chapter 3 examines how citizens articulated and mobilised their legal and state consciousness when they engaged with Zimbabwe’s politicised legal institutions. Through the selective application of the law, ZANU-PF could endanger the safety of individuals reporting crimes to the police or taking cases to court. Citizens like Patrick and Father Mkandla situated themselves against these practices, demanding that the police and the courts ‘follow the rules’ by interacting with these institutions as if they were rule-bound. In these expressions of their legal consciousness, both men played upon divisions among civil servants working within state institutions (identified in Chapter 2) to achieve occasional ‘successes’ through the law. Their commitment to rule-bound behaviour was also an expression of their state consciousness. By ‘remaining on the right side of law’ themselves, these men could make claims to a particular kind of citizenship that demanded an extension of the authority of the state beyond its ability to guarantee ‘rights’, to a broader responsibility to safeguard citizens’ human dignity, civility, and morality.