South Africa appoints first woman Chief Justice

South Africa appointed its first female chief justice on Thursday, July 25.

President Cyril Ramaphosa named Mandisa Maya, the current deputy chief justice, as the country's new most senior judge. Her term is due to start on Sept. 1, when she will replace Chief Justice Raymond Zondo as the head of the apex Constitutional Court. Zondo is retiring.

Maya, 60, previously served as the judge president of the Supreme Court of Appeal, the second-highest court in South Africa, before her promotion to the Constitutional Court. She was the first Black woman to be appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Appeal and the first woman to be appointed deputy president and then president of that court.

Ramaphosa nominated Maya for chief justice in February and she was interviewed by the Judicial Services Commission in May. The commission recommended her and noted her appointment "would be a significant milestone for the country,” Ramaphosa said in a statement.

Maya grew up in a rural part of South Africa's Eastern Cape province. She won a Fulbright Scholarship in 1989 to do a Master's in law at Duke University in the United States, an incredibly rare achievement for a young Black woman during the apartheid era of racial segregation in South Africa.

She said in an interview in 2017 that initially she intended to study medicine but changed her mind on the first day she attended university in South Africa and switched to law after looking at a medical textbook.

South Africa has had all-male chief justices since the post was created in 1910 when it was still 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.