Forensic orality and the politics of voice: Decolonising evidentiary practices in South African Courts

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This article demonstrates that forensic orality—truth produced through voice, narrative performance, silence, memory, and embodied speech—remains foundational to evidentiary justice in post-apartheid South Africa. Although the judiciary inherited a deep commitment to written legalism, recent jurisprudence affirms the courtroom as an emphatically oral arena, where credibility and truth are shaped not only by the evidentiary record but also by how stories are narrated, how evidence is submitted within the adversarial system, and how judicial officers listen. Through a purposive analysis of post-2015 cases—including O’Sullivan v NDPP (2016) on testimonial reliability; S v Masiya (2017) and S v Mzozo (2018) on gendered vulnerability; the Coligny trial (2017–2020) on racialised listening; S v Baba (2020) on narrative contradiction; S v Chauke (2021) on interpreter distortion; S v Khoza (2022) on digital orality; and protest-related jurisprudence from Senekal to #FeesMustFall—the study reveals how voice remains entangled with race, gender, class, language, and trauma. Guided by decolonial legal theory, feminist jurisprudence, and the epistemic injustice framework, the article argues that persistent colonial hierarchies of listening continue to undermine Black, rural, female, marginalised, and traumatised witnesses. However, land-restitution hearings, such as Tafelkop (2019) and District Six (2021–2023), demonstrate the corrective potential of Indigenous oral memory as a form of juridical truth-telling. The article advances a decolonial evidentiary framework centred on multilingual listening, the recognition of Indigenous epistemologies, trauma-informed adjudication, and the systematic integration of digital orality into contemporary forensic practice—offering a model for transforming South African courtroom listening and strengthening evidentiary justice.

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