Mandisa Maya becomes South Africa’s first female chief justice
Mandisa Maya, the deputy chief justice of South Africa has been appointed as the nation’s first female chief justice by President Cyril Ramaphosa. The current chief justice, Raymond Zondo will be retiring, and Maya is scheduled to take his post on September 1.
Prior to being appointed to the constitutional court, Maya, 60, held the position of judge president at the Supreme Court of Appeal, which is the second-highest court in South Africa.
She was the first Black woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Appeal as a judge, and the first woman to hold the positions of deputy president and president of that court.
Maya was examined by the Judicial Services Commission in May after Ramaphosa recommended her for chief justice in February. Her selection “would be a significant milestone for the country,” according to the commission’s recommendation, which Ramaphosa acknowledged in a statement.
In a 2017 interview, she revealed that while she had originally planned to pursue medicine, she had changed her mind after reading a medical textbook on her first day of college in South Africa and had instead decided to study law.
Maya was raised in a remote area of the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. Her Fulbright Scholarship to study law at Duke University in the United States in 1989 was an extraordinarily uncommon accomplishment for a young Black lady growing up in South Africa during the apartheid era of racial segregation.
Chief justices of South Africa have always been men since the position was established in 1910, when the country was still a British colony. After the apartheid system of white minority rule was abolished in 1994, Maya will be the seventh chief justice to lead South Africa’s democracy.
Written by Precious Adams
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