One Tragic Night (40 page)

After she finished matric, Masipa went off to work for two years because her parents couldn't afford for her to study further, and found herself in a state of flux, moving from job to job. She says this in the documentary:

After those two years she decided that, whether or not there was money to be made, she had to go back to study and, on her mother's recommendation, registered for a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Social Work and Psychology.

By then she had met her husband, who was working in construction at the time. He had not finished his schooling, but harboured ambitions of becoming an accountant. After her first year at university, Masipa continued her studies via correspondence through the University of South Africa, returning to Johannesburg to marry her man. They had two children in quick succession in 1971 and 1972 and during that time she completed her BA. Her husband, who is now a tax consultant, also studied through correspondence at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Masipa then began searching for a job as a social worker but when she failed to find one she became increasingly disillusioned. She did some practical work at the Bantu Affairs Commission and was extremely disheartened by perpetuating the stereotypes of black women. She spent much of her time there trying to trace the parents of lost children or filling out forms for pensioners – hardly the challenging work she was looking for.

It was around this time that she saw an advertisement for junior reporters at
The World
newspaper. She called and expressed interest, went for an interview
and was hired. Masipa was stationed in Soweto in 1976, both a volatile and exciting period in the country's history. It was the time of the Soweto uprising, the school boycotts, when the township was combusting.
The World
was at the centre of this all – editor Percy Qoboza was arrested and photographer Sam Nzima snapped the iconic image of dying schoolboy Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo, with his crying sister Antoinette Sithole running alongside them.

Quiet and reserved, Masipa found the job tough and soon discovered that as a journalist it's not enough only to be a good writer. You have to have a knack for speaking to people. The mentor who trained her took her from one drinking hole to another, explaining to her that it was in the shebeens of the township that she would find her stories. She learnt quickly to come out of her shell so that she could succeed as a reporter working primarily on crime stories.

In October 1977,
The World
was banned by Justice Minister Jimmy Kruger and the staff detained. A profile on Masipa in
The New York Times
gives further insight into her experiences at this time:

Masipa and other employees who remained moved on to the
Post
, which was launched in 1978. When the
Post
was closed down in 1980, the staff then migrated to
The Sowetan
, which is still published today. While at the
Post
, Masipa launched a supplement called
Post Women
, which she headed.

After a while, however, she became disillusioned with journalism and spent a stint in the advertising industry as a copywriter. But four years later she returned
to the media world when she took a job at
Pace
magazine in 1988. At the same time she made the decision to start studying for her LLB. She and her family were living in Tembisa, a township to the east of Johannesburg. Although the family had an old car, they only used it on weekends, and during the week she caught the train to the city and her husband and children waited on the side of the road for her return. Her husband cooked supper as she worked on her assignments, often staying up all night to meet a deadline.

Once she had completed her LLB, she began to look to doing her articles. She was already over 40, an anomaly in the legal fraternity. As a result, she went straight to do pupillage at the Johannesburg Bar to become an advocate. She spent three months working under a Master, a practising advocate, and then wrote her bar exams – and failed.

Masipa was devastated. She had never failed at anything in her life. She seriously contemplated leaving her job because, as a pupil, you don't earn any money and she had a family at home that she needed to feed. But Advocate Max Labe SC, chairperson of the Johannesburg Bar at the time, got wind that she wanted to leave and summoned her to see him. Labe impressed on her the need for people of colour at the bar and convinced her to remain. She had failed Criminal Law, so her Master referred her to a new Master who specialised in this section and she passed comfortably on her second attempt.

Defence counsel Mannie Witz remembers receiving the phone call from Labe, asking him to take Masipa on as a pupil.

‘He said will I take this lady as a pupil and I didn't know she was actually older than me. I thought it's like going to be a youngster. He brought Matilda to see me. I said fine, no problem. She was already in her early fifties. I didn't know she was already going to be earmarked to become a future judge. I still said to her, “At this age in your life, what do you want to come and do pupillage for?” She said this is her interest and her passion.

‘We had some very good, lekker, liberal guys in our group. She spent time with me but she moved around with all the different advocates. Lovely person, very quiet, very reserved,' recalls Witz.

He describes her as very hard-working and diligent, and was shocked at the hours that she put in. ‘She did very well, she passed with flying colours.'

Masipa was admitted as an advocate in 1991, one of only three black women at the Johannesburg Bar at the time, along with Kgomotso Moroka and Lucy Mailula. Her appointment was so unusual that she once received a call from an opponent wanting to set up an appointment, and he asked to speak to ‘Mr Masipa'. It never occurred to him that she might be a woman. New on the scene,
she recalled in the documentary that she was mostly occupied by criminal or unopposed divorce matters:

In 1998 she was appointed as a judge in what was then the Transvaal Provincial Division of the High Court of South Africa, only the second black woman to be appointed to the bench after Mailula. Masipa had been at the bar for only seven years, relatively ‘young' in terms of experience, but had been recommended by a colleague during a time when the focus was on transformation.

She learnt from the likes of Bob Nugent who went on to become a Supreme Court of Appeal judge but was also eager to learn from other colleagues at the bench. She also established early on that she prefers to sit with assessors, to assist her in looking at the facts of the case. In one of the first cases she presided over, she sat with two assessors who had legal backgrounds and found the experience ‘beautiful'.

Judge Masipa spent time out of Johannesburg presiding over circuit courts and discovered a trend that saddened her – young children coming to court facing charges of serious crimes such as murder and robbery.

Masipa acknowledges that she has a special interest in the rehabilitation of offenders. There have been instances in which teenagers accused of serious crimes have come before her in court and she has been reluctant to send them to prison. She felt that they deserve a second chance and recommended correctional supervision instead. As she described in
Courting Justice
:

In the documentary, Masipa acknowledged that her upbringing in Orlando East had an impact on the way she rules:

Masipa also explained how being a woman might impact on some of her rulings:

Despite her preference for rehabilitation over incarceration, when it comes to youths Masipa has not been opposed to harsh maximum sentences when she has deemed it necessary, particularly in incidents of violence against women.

In May 2013, for example, she handed down a 252-year sentence against the ‘Axe Man' Shepherd Moyo, a serial rapist. Masipa gave him 15 years for each of his 11 counts of robbery, 12 years for attempted murder and life sentences for three rape charges.

She said in her judgment that the three rape victims of the man who carried out a spate of house robberies in northern Johannesburg had been left traumatised for life and his lack of remorse made it unlikely that he could be rehabilitated.

‘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,' she said.

In 2009, Masipa handed down a life sentence to a policeman, Freddy Mashamba, who shot and killed his former wife after a row over their divorce settlement. ‘No one is above the law. You deserve to go to jail for life because you are not a protector. You are a killer,' Masipa told him.

She has also presided over other high-profile matters that have featured in the media spotlight. She heard the case involving the dismissal of Eskom chief executive Jacob Maroga and his claim for R85 million in compensation, where she ruled in favour of Eskom and the Department of Public Enterprises. In her judgment, she commented on the government's powers in relation to stateowned enterprises, saying: ‘A shareholder does not have the right to interfere in the decision-making of the board in respect to the company's internal affairs.'

Masipa also ruled in a landmark judgment in the case of the
Blue Moonlight Properties 39 v Occupiers Saratoga Avenue and the City of Johannesburg
, where she found that the city had failed to fulfil its obligations to find alternative accommodation for squatters threatened with eviction from old warehouses in Berea. ‘It is clear that the city is trying to distance itself from the problems of the unlawful occupiers in this matter,' she ruled.

Being one of the few black female judges in the country currently on the bench, she says in
Courting Justice
that she hopes her presence encourages more people to seek out justice: