Two trials ended in Johannesburg on Friday, and which was the more extraordinary is less obvious than it may seem. Not that there is any doubting which was the more thrilling and sensational. Whatever room for additional melodrama that the facts of Reeva Steenkamp’s killing left in their wake, Oscar Pistorius was thoughtful enough to fill with the relentless sobbing, retching and vomiting that struck some as so transparently theatrical that it almost served as a signed confession to murder.
One observer who evidently disagreed with that was the only one who mattered — the austere, reticent, dignified, red-robed 66-year-old woman whom Pistorius took such care to address after almost his every sentence as “my lady”.
For Thokozile Masipa, this was a monumental trial too, though of nerve rather than criminal intent. The pressure on the judge, with the eyes of the Steenkamp and Pistorius families intently studying her reactions (not that there were any; her stillness was absolute) and the entire world pruriently focused on her courtroom, was colossal. She may have felt that her country’s reputation as well as her own was on the line.
However astonishing it is that a national hero and global icon of sport (and of more than sport) found himself in the dock, it was no less so that Masipa was looking down on him from the bench. There was a time, and not so very long ago, when the power balance in any relationship between them would have been very different.
Had she been a maid in the Pistorius household when he was a boy, he would have referred to her not as “my lady” but as “the girl”. She would probably have slept in a rondavel, a tiny round hut with a corrugated iron roof at the far end of the garden.
Considering where she came from, she might have considered that almost a luxury. The eldest of 10 children, five of whom died in childhood while another was stabbed to death in early adulthood, she was born in a two-bedroom house in what was a considered a poor area, even in Soweto.
As a child, she slept in what a New York Times profile called the dining room, though the elegance that designation implies seems a little misleading, and when visitors were occupying that space she slept on the kitchen floor. She was clever, bookish and determined, but had to waste years as a messenger and a tea girl.
Only in her mid-20s did she find the money to go to university and take a degree in social work. She later became a reporter, specialising in women’s issues, the suppression of her people and the latter’s kissing cousin, which is crime.
In 1977 she was arrested while demonstrating against the detention of black male journalist colleagues, and a policeman hissed at her, in Afrikaans: “Today you are going to meet Steve Biko” — a reference to the great activist whom police had savagely beaten to death.
She survived, but found herself sleeping on the floor once again, this time in a filthy cell, and being ordered, by way of a charming piece of inter-racial symbolism, to clean out what had been deposited in the lavatory by former occupants. She refused, and was released when the white owners of the newspaper where she worked paid a fine.
Later she switched to the law, qualifying as a barrister a few months after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison. Within 10 years she was her country’s youngest senior judge, and within a quarter of a century she was ingratiatingly being addressed as “my lady” by just the sort of self-entitled child of privilege who might once have been her master.
Quite a life. It would be naive beyond comprehension to hold up Thokozile Masipa as decisive proof that South Africa has become a rainbow paradise in which the undiluted horror of its recent history has given way to utopia. The murder rate there remains horrendous, though the statistic for 2013 will now be one less than many expected. But it is evidence of remarkable progress that it was a black woman who acquitted Pistorius of that murder, and to find the wiseacres of social media analysing his acquittal as “white man’s justice” is almost inspiring in its ironic imbecility. It was pure and simple justice, and justice is blind to colour as to all else.
It does not visit the sins of the Afrikaner fathers upon their sons, or nurture historic resentments, and it does not play to the gallery. It clinically examines the evidence, and decides whether a case has been proved. After clinically dismantling the prosecution’s case, she decided it had not.
Another black lawyer who enjoyed an unlikely career progression, Nelson Mandela, would have been proud. She none the less concluded that the shooting qualified as South Africa’s version of manslaughter, and has more work to do before she returns to the obscurity she is said to prefer.
Once she has passed sentence, her name will be swiftly forgotten. While the film studios will read scores of screenplays about the rise and fall of Oscar Pistorius, you doubt they will see a single one about the rise and rise of Thokozile Masipa.
And yet, however astounding and inspiring a testament to the resilience and limitless ambition of the human spirit it was that Pistorius overcame the amputation of his legs to become not just a Paralympian but a full Olympian, it was more so that she overcame the viciously disabling hand dealt her by fate and the wickedness of apartheid to sit in his judgment.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
