Sokhulu & Partners is a South African legal drama television series created by Portia Gumede and Roberta Durrant and produced by Paw Paw Films which explores all aspects of the South African Constitution and Bill of Rights and how they apply in practice.
The series aims to popularise constitutionality and the workings of the Constitutional Court by giving the law a human face.
Mabuto and Zwelisizwe Sokhulu are brothers who grew up in a rural part of KwaZulu-Natal. Bright, ambitious and driven by a desire to succeed, they are both qualified attorneys and for the past few years have been running their own small law firm.
They have just won their first client application to be heard in the Constitutional Court.
This has spurred them to move the firm to Johannesburg, where they employ the beautiful and back-stabbing Winnie Molepo as a candidate attorney, a mistake that almost costs them the firm.
Mabuto has another agenda besides that of being a top attorney and one day, he hopes, a judge on the Constitutional Court. He wants to clear his father's name.
In 1985 Zweli and Mabuto's father, a truck driver, was convicted of the murder of a hitchhiker and sentenced to death. He was not executed, however. Wanting to put this right is partly what drove Mabuto to become an attorney.
Zweli's choice of the law comes from admiration for his older brother as well as a deep desire to do good in the world.
Both brothers are convinced of their father's innocence, but in Mabuto's case it has become an obsession, and part of the series focuses on his efforts to investigate a crime that occurred more than 20 years ago in order to prove that his father was wrongly convicted.
The judge who sentenced their father, Justice Douglas Patrick, is now a Justice of the Constitutional Court and one of those who hears the cases they present.
Background
The series is set in the legal practice of the Sokhulu brothers in Johannesburg. The majority of the cases they handle land up in the Constitutional Court.
Some of the cases features in the series include: the right to health; sexual offences; corporal punishment; and the right to education; and those dealing with customary law and inheritance, the right to housing in an urban renewal context and right to a clean and safe environment.
South Africa has the most advanced constitution in the world. The series will aim to foster a sense of pride in our justice system as well as to provoke debate about facets of the law, in an entertaining context.
The show's working title was Brothers in Law.