Female CJ's long and winding road

South Africa's incoming Chief Justice Mandisa Maya is well aware that ‘some of the decisions we (judges) make have the capacity to destroy a person’s life’. Since the announcement of Maya’s appointment as the country’s first female CJ, a fact about her that has been often repeated is that more than 200 of her judgments have been reported. ‘It’s actually more like 300,’ she says. Although Maya did not often sit in cases that garnered media attention, many of her judgments were quietly precedent-setting, such as the Krok decision on double taxation, which received international acclaim, and the AfriForum case on the language policy at Unisa. Sunday Times legal writer Franny Rabkin notes that it is more famous for being the first appeal court judgment to have been delivered in isiXhosa, it was an important judgment on its merits. But when she is asked whether she is ‘proud’ of any of her judgments, she appears uncomfortable with the idea. She says the intellectual side of judgment writing is ‘very important. But it doesn’t touch the core of me’. ‘I can say that those (judgments) that made me sleep better at night were those that had a human element,’ she says. She gives as an example a murder or rape case where the accused had been terrorising a community. ‘And when you hand down your judgment, you can see from the faces in the gallery that, my goodness, those people, they look like they feel they have received some justice. I find that most gratifying.’

Maya said she did not want to diminish the significance of being appointed the first female CJ. But ‘the biggest moment for me’ was her appointment as the leader of the SCA – ‘because of the history of the (SCA), which used to be the pinnacle of everything that is legal in SA’. In 2017, Maya took the unprecedented step of laying bare some of the tensions at the SCA before the JSC, saying it was not until that year, after a diversity workshop, that black and white justices sat next to each other in the tea room. As leader of the court, she drove a team-building process there that was praised in subsequent JSC interviews. But it was not always so. The Sunday Times notes that long corridors are a feature of many court buildings – including the Western Cape High Court, where a much younger Maya acted for a term in 1999. ‘There was a judge – I will never forget this – and if we were walking towards each other in one of those long corridors, he would turn back rather than come and pass me,’ she says. But there were other judges who were very good to her in the Cape court, she says. There was Judge President Edwin King, who invited her to act, the late Judge Dennis van Reenen, who helped her with the first application she had for her recusal (‘You’ll do no such thing. You go and tell those counsel there is no basis for that application’), and former Deputy Judge President Jeanette Traverso, ‘who did not suffer fools gladly, but who is a very kind human being’. There was also the former Judge President John Hlophe who ‘really played the role of a big brother to me’. ‘Because it was tough. It was difficult to be in that court. So he took it upon himself to pop into my chambers every day, just to reassure me that I was good enough and had every right to be in that court. (He said I should) just apply myself and let my work speak for itself.’

Full Sunday Times report