4 - ‘What Is Abnormal Is Normal’

Summary

Chapter 4 examines the experiences of young, black, urban-based, and predominantly male civic and political activists, who were pervasively persecuted by the police through violent arrests and inhumane conditions in detention. For ZANU-PF, the stages of arrest and detention offered a public platform on which to perform the party’s portrayal of activists as ‘criminals’. Framing the physical violence, mental torment and isolation that marked their treatment at the hands of the police as an experience which would not occur in a ‘normal’, ‘rule-bound’ and ‘democratic’ society, activists in turn refused to accept these efforts to criminalise them. ZANU-PF’s use of the law, activists argued, could not grant it authority. Activists were confronted, however, with the fact that their understandings of their arrest and detention as ‘illegitimate’ were not universally shared. In the eyes of certain family members they were still ‘criminalised’, despite the fact that they were targeted for arrest due to their political activities, rather than for, for example, committing petty theft. This highlights the existence of multiple legal consciousnesses in Zimbabwe, some of which are built less on notions of how the law should work, and more on a recognition of the power of law itself.