OPINION | Academic’s aim to expose linguistic injustices that plague SA’s legal system

The confluence of language and justice is at the heart of Rhodes University academic Dr Zakeera Docrat’s work. Her love for, and appreciation of, isiXhosa as the means through which most people in the Eastern Cape communicate propelled her to study the language along with law at university. Docrat obtained her doctorate from Rhodes in 2020 with a thesis that firmly challenges chief justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s “linguistically exclusionary legal system” for the country’s courts.