Pius Langa

Pius Nkonzo Langa SCOB (25 March 1939 – 24 July 2013) was Chief Justice of South Africa from June 2005 to October 2009.

Langa was born on 25 March 1939 in Bushbuckridge in the former Transvaal Province.

He was the second of seven siblings, with four brothers and two sisters.

Their father, Simon Peter Langa, was a Zulu-speaking charismatic preacher from Natal, whose work for the Pentecostal Holiness Church had brought the family to Bushbuckridge temporarily.

Their mother was Swazi, and, because their father's work required frequent travel, Langa learned several other South African languages as a child.

The family left Bushbuckridge during his infancy and spent several years in various parts of the Northern Transvaal, primarily in Pietersburg, until in 1949 they settled in Stanger, Natal.

Langa attended primary school in Stanger and then completed two years of secondary education, in 1954 and 1955, at Adams College in Amanzimtoti.

He later called his sojourn at Adams College "one of the earliest miracles in my life": his parents could not afford to pay for his secondary education, but he received a bursary to attend the college, where his elder brother, Sam, was a trainee teacher.

At the end of 1955, then aged 16, he left school with a first-class junior certificate to find a job in the urban centre of Durban.

Langa spent 1956 unemployed in Durban, looking for work and "struggling" with government administrators over their application of the pass laws: because his dompas recorded his home district as Bushbuckridge, he was not allowed to live in Natal while unemployed.

He was deeply affected by this early experience of the "ugliness" of apartheid, later writing in a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that, "In that first flush of youth, I had thought I could do anything, aspire to anything and that nothing could stop me. I was wrong."

Though he had initially hoped to find a clerical job, Langa was finally employed at a clothing factory in early 1957.

The factory made shirts and he was tasked with distributing textiles among the machinists.

In his spare time, he studied independently for his matric exams, which he passed at the end of 1960.

After matriculating, Langa joined the Department of Justice in a low-level position, serving as a court interpreter and messenger.

Over the next 17 years, he worked continuously in a series of magistrate's courts across Natal, beginning with nine months in rural Impendle, then several years in Harding, and then stints in Camperdown, Howick, Stanger, and Ndwedwe.

During his early years as an interpreter and clerk, he developed "a growing love for law as a means of solving at least some of the problems that confronted our people", and he became convinced that a legal education was a prerequisite to influencing the justice system.

In 1970, he enrolled in a part-time correspondence program at the University of South Africa, and he graduated with a BJuris in 1973 and an LLB in 1976.

At the same time, with his BJuris degree, he rose through the ranks of the magistrate's offices, becoming a prosecutor and then a magistrate.

During the same period, Langa occasionally spent time at his family home in KwaMashu, a township outside Durban.

His three younger brothers were all active in the student anti-apartheid movement, and in the mid-1970s, during the era of the Soweto uprising, the house became "a hotbed" for their activist activities and sometimes for Special Branch raids.

Because his brothers and their friends were adherents of Black Consciousness politics, while he was attracted to the non-racialism of the rival Charterist faction, Langa "regarded it as my function to debate with them" about politics.

Langa's father died in 1972 and his mother in 1984.

Two of his younger brothers, Bheki and Mandla, left South Africa for exile in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising; they ultimately became a diplomat and a novelist respectively.

He left the civil service at the rank of magistrate in 1977, when he was admitted as an advocate.

Thereafter he practised law in Durban, specialising in the defence of anti-apartheid activists accused of political offences.

The third, Ben, was assassinated in 1984 by his comrades in the African National Congress (ANC), who wrongly believed that he had become a police informant.

According to Mark Gevisser, Langa's moral opposition to capital punishment was such that he called publicly for the killers to be spared the death penalty, though they were hanged anyway.

He was a member of the United Democratic Front and the president of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers from 1988 to 1994.

During the same period, he attended the negotiations to end apartheid as a member of the Constitutional Committee of the African National Congress.

Shortly after he took silk in January 1994, Langa was appointed to the newly established Constitutional Court by post-apartheid President Nelson Mandela.

Formerly a human rights lawyer, he was appointed as a puisne judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa upon its inception in 1995.

In August 1997, Mandela additionally appointed him as the court's second Deputy President; his title was changed to Deputy Chief Justice after the Sixth Constitutional Amendment was passed in November 2001.

He was the Deputy Chief Justice of South Africa from November 2001 until May 2005, when President Thabo Mbeki elevated him to the Chief Justiceship.

He was South Africa's first black African Chief Justice.

The son of a Zulu pastor, Langa left school as a teenager to enter the workforce.

Over the next two decades, he studied for his matric certificate while working in a clothing factory and then studied for his legal qualifications while working as a civil servant in the Department of Justice.

On 1 June 2005, he succeeded Arthur Chaskalson as Chief Justice, a position which he held until his mandatory retirement in October 2009.

Leading the court during a period of political turmoil, Langa was widely respected for his mild and conciliatory manner, though he was also subject to criticism from both populist and conservative quarters.

In particular, he is remembered for leading the court in lodging a controversial misconduct complaint against Judge John Hlophe, who was accused of attempting to interfere with the Constitutional Court's judgment in the politically sensitive matter of Thint v National Director of Public Prosecutions.