South Africa Names Its First Female Chief Justice

South Africa has appointed its first female chief justice, Mandisa Maya, as the country’s new most senior judge. Maya, 60, previously served as the judge president of the Supreme Court of Appeal and was the first Black woman to be appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal.

She was nominated for chief justice in February and was recommended by the Judicial Services Commission in May.

Maya grew up in a rural part of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province and won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1989 to study law at Duke University in the United States.

She initially intended to study medicine but switched to law after seeing a medical textbook. South Africa has had all-male chief justices since the post was created in 1910 when it was a British colony.

Maya will be the eighth chief justice since South Africa became a democracy with the end of the apartheid system of white minority rule in 1994.