Behind and Beyond the Bench: Challenges and Opportunities for Judicial Protection and the Attainment of Justice in Zimbabwe as Explored in Petina Gappah’s Rotten Row (2016)

This article interrogates the role that judicial protection, a critical element in the justice delivery system, plays in the broader quest for justice in Zimbabwe. Within the formal judicial system, justice is realised when officials sworn to serve the system and constitutionally mandated to dispense justice work consistently, fairly, and uniformly to protect the citizens. Whenever there are challenges to judicial protection, both behind and beyond the bench, the very notion of justice is compromised, and this is not uncommon in a fluid system manned by fallible human beings. Using seven purposely selected short stories from Petina Gappah’s short story collection Rotten Row, namely “The White Orphan,” “The Lament of Hester Muponda,” “In Sad Cypress,” “A Kind of Justice,” “The Death of Wonder,” “A Short Story of Zaka the Zulu,” and “The Dropper,” the article capitalises on the burgeoning law and literature interstices to reveal the redacted yet valuable events that occur behind and away from the courts and are symptomatic of the shortcomings and/or weaknesses of judicial protection at both the individual and institutional level. These events have the capacity to enhance or curtail justice. Hopefully, this analysis helps to demystify and de-sacralise the judiciary so that the reflexive spaces afforded by discussing law and justice in literary spaces nurture the occult instability that can deconstruct notions of law and justice to make them both accessible and relevant to societies.