Thokozile Matilda Masipa, the sixty-six-year-old judge in the Oscar Pistorius trial, which resumed Monday morning in Pretoria, has been sending messages all of her professional life. Pistorius, who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, addresses Masipa as “My Lady,” as do the lawyers on both sides, and she will ultimately decide his guilt. (South Africa doesn’t have jury trials.) In the mid-seventies, when she was known primarily as Matilda or Tilly, she went to jail herself, arrested after demonstrating in downtown Johannesburg against the apartheid regime’s attempts to suppress a newspaper she worked on, as well as the arrests of other journalists. Masipa and other women journalists who marched that day were deeply invested in exposing the harshness of white-minority rule, and, in particular, its consequences for women.
“We dealt with women’s issues—especially the women N.G.O.s like the Y.W.C.A. that were making a difference in their communities,” Pearl Luthuli, one of Masipa’s former colleagues, told me.
Another colleague, Nomavenda Mathiane, remembered, “After ’76, it was really hell.”
These were the days of the Soweto uprisings. In June, 1976, the police killed Hector Pieterson, who was thirteen years old; Luthuli remembered the incident as “the boiling point,” although it was also a turning point in the struggle against apartheid. Another defining moment came in September, 1977, with the murder of Stephen Biko, a popular activist whose death ignited more protests in townships all over South Africa. “In those days, we didn’t see our struggle as politics. Our very existence was being threatened,” Luthuli said.
Luthuli was twenty-three, and Tilly, as she called Masipa then, was twenty-nine at the time of Biko’s death, married with two children (she now has four grandchildren), and very focussed. She had already earned a degree in social work, in 1974, and, for a while, had used what she learned working with women in the townships, including Soweto, where she was born. Many of the women were contending not just with the conditions of apartheid and poverty but with domestic violence.
Now Masipa was putting all that background into her career as a journalist, covering serious issues that involved but were not exclusive to women. “We were writing about what was going on in the townships—demonstrations, brutal police, and especially women who had been detained, leaving their children behind,” Luthuli said. “Mothers whose sons had been detained. Another mother who was detained for months because the police couldn’t find her son.”
On the day of their arrest, Luthuli said, the women journalists were marching in downtown Johannesburg to protest the detention of several of their black male colleagues at the Post, and to hand over a memorandum to the authorities stating that they were journalists and needed to be granted the right to work freely without fear of jail. As they set off for the demonstration, Luthuli recalled, “We were very, very scared because they threatened us.”
Luthuli remembered that a white policemen, speaking in Afrikaans, shouted at her and Masipa, “Vandag julle sal Steve Biko ont moet” (“Today you are going to meet Steve Biko”).
Once five of the women, including Masipa, had been roughly transported to the jail cells, Luthuli recalled, they continued their defiance, refusing orders to clean toilets that she said were clogged with human waste from previous inmates. Luthuli told me the message they sent that day was, “We are not prisoners yet, so we will not follow the orders you give to prisoners.”
All of them slept that night on the cold floor of the cell, she remembered, using as sheets the pages of newspapers that they had taken with them on their march. The following morning, the women objected to taking part in the court proceedings. The message the five were sending was clear, Luthuli said: “We are not going to participate in your sham trial.” They were eventually transported in a separate bus after all the other prisoners had been taken to the courthouse, where they refused to enter a plea, sending still another message: “We don’t recognize this government.”
But, Luthuli told me, the women were released after the white editors of their white-owned newspaper published an editorial stating that the women were young and headstrong and should be released. “They just needed to get out their paper, so they paid a fine to get our release,” Luthuli said.
Still, the women persisted in covering the growing anti-apartheid protests, and Masipa became women’s-page editor of the Post—“no mean feat,” Luthuli recalled. “That position was for a white woman.” A previous editor, a white woman, had left for England, saying she couldn’t raise her children in South Africa. “Tilly was steady and grounded,” Luthuli said. “She would be leaving work to go home, tend her family… She would leave work and go home and study.”
Nomavenda Mathiane remembered that Masipa was “very thorough and didn’t suffer fools gladly.” (Masipa recently admonished attendees in an overflow courtroom, “It is not an entertainment place… Please restrain yourself.”) Mathiane added, “Sometimes the police would call up and say you are not supposed to write this and that. But Tilly would stand her ground. She’s really a tough cookie. And I think her strength comes from being so laid back.” At the same time, “You could still joke with her.”
Masipa began her legal studies at a time when Nelson Mandela was still in prison; she earned her degree in 1990, the year he was released, and, having qualified, began practicing law. At some point, like many South African blacks with Christian names, she began using her African name professionally, too—Thokozile, which, in Zulu, means “happy.”
In 1998, Masipa was appointed as a judge in the High Court of South Africa—only the second black woman to the bench. Albie Sachs, a former Constitutional Court Justice told me, “It was part of a breakthrough. In a sense, she is a pioneer.”
Even today, Masipa still belongs to a minority—only seventy-six of South Africa’s two hundred and thirty-nine judges are women. Earlier this year, the Women’s Legal Center and Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, nonprofit organizations promoting women’s rights, stated, “With 51.3 percent females in the country, having only two female justices in the Constitutional Court, the highest court on Constitutional matters, is inexcusable.”
Masipa’s past experiences as a journalist appear to have informed her approach to the bench; she said in an interview before the Judicial Services Commission, in 2003, that judges should be more transparent, using the media to explain their decisions and helping the public understand the judicial process. (Her office indicated to me that she did not want to talk about any aspect of her life while the Pistorius trial is going on.)
Her life may help inform her actions on the bench in other ways, particularly as it relates to domestic abuse, rape, and the murder of women. (Statistics from the International Criminal Police Organization, released in 2009, indicate that a woman is raped in South Africa every seventeen seconds.) In one case before her, Masipa handed down a two-hundred-and-fifty-two-year prison sentence to a man who raped three women in the course of home burglaries; in another, she gave a life sentence to a policeman who shot and killed his estranged wife in an argument over their divorce settlement. (“You deserve to go to jail for life because you are not a protector. You are a killer,” Masipa told him.) Her perspective could prove crucial in the Pistorius case, in which the prosecution has told a story of a man, quick to anger and reckless with guns, shooting his girlfriend after a quarrel, while the defense has drawn a picture of a boyfriend who loved Steenkamp and so would never hurt her, and tragically mistook her for an intruder. Both might see something in a comment that Masipa made, according to South Africa’s CTVNews, in the rape case: “The worst, in my view, is that he attacked and raped the victims in the sanctity of their own homes, where they thought they were safe.”
In reaching her verdict, Masipa will have the help of two legal assessors whom she selected, who sit with her on the bench daily. But the focus, as the defense reaches the end of its case in the next few days, will be on her alone. South Africa and the rest of the world is now awaiting the message Masipa will send this time, in her judgment of Oscar Pistorius.
