37 Facts About Pius Langa

Pius Nkonzo Langa SCOB was Chief Justice of South Africa from June 2005 to October 2009.

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

Pius Langa 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pius Langa 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.

Pius 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.

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

Pius Langa practised at the Natal Bar for the next 17 years, with a varied practice but an overwhelming focus on political trials brought under apartheid legislation.

Pius Langa served as NADEL's national president from 1988 to 1994.

Pius Langa represented the ANC at the negotiations to end apartheid, both during pre-negotiations at Groote Schuur and Pretoria and during formal multi-party talks at the Convention for a Democratic South Africa and Multi-Party Negotiating Forum.

Pius Langa held that position until November 2001, when, under the restructuring of the judiciary occasioned by the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution of South Africa, he and Chask n became Deputy Chief Justice and Chief Justice respectively.

In March 2005, President Thabo Mbeki announced that Pius Langa was his preferred candidate for the Chief Justice post.

Early in his career as Chief Justice, Pius Langa was tasked with mediating the resolution of a major spat in the Cape Division of the High Court of South Africa, where Judge President John Hlophe had come into conflict with several of his colleagues after accusing them of racism.

Thint was a politically sensitive case, involving the search and seizure of the belongings of former Deputy President Jacob Zuma; Pius Langa ultimately wrote on behalf of a majority of the court in finding against Zuma.

Pius Langa is a singularly measured person, never visibly flustered, the Kiplingesque man who doesn't lose his head.

Pius Langa's critics said that he "lacked the hard edge" necessary for judicial leadership and that he had allowed politicians to become too powerful in the Judicial Service Commission, which he chaired.

However, Pius Langa was generally admired for his tolerance of dissent in the Constitutional Court and Judicial Service Commission, as well as for his "ability to calm troubled waters without raising his voice or taking the offensive".

Pius Langa himself said that his foremost priority as Chief Justice was the stability of the judiciary.

The Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution reflected in 2021 that Pius Langa had led the court "courageously" through "a period of change".

Partly because these "lawfare" cases were often accompanied by populist political attacks on the judiciary, the Pius Langa court operated in difficult political conditions; its dissent rate increased significantly during Pius Langa's tenure.

In large part Pius Langa was viewed as handling these tensions astutely.

Pius Langa was involved in the early stages of establishing the independent Office of the Chief Justice, rather than the Department of Justice, as the hub of the administration of the courts.

Pius Langa handed down judgment, three years later, in the related matter of Christian Education South Africa v Minister of Education, in which the court dismissed a challenge to a statutory prohibition against corporal punishment in schools.

Pius Langa was noted for his dissenting opinion in Masiya v Director of Public Prosecutions, Pretoria.

Pius Langa remained involved in the Commonwealth's work on democracy and constitutionalism, participating in constitutional review commissions in Sri Lanka, Rwanda, and Tanzania and serving as a member of the Judicial Integrity Group which drafted the Bangalore Principles of Judicial Conduct; he joked in 2005 that the Commonwealth "seem[ed] to consider my work with the Constitutional Court as spare time".

Pius Langa retired from the judiciary on 11 October 2009 alongside Justices Yvonne Mokgoro, Kate O'Regan, and Albie Sachs; each had served their full term in the Constitutional Court.

Pius Langa was admitted to hospital in Durban in April 2013.

Pius Langa returned to hospital in June and died on 24 July 2013 at the Milpark Hospital in Johannesburg.

Pius Langa was appointed as an honorary professor in procedural and clinic law at the University of Natal in June 1998, and he served for several years as a distinguished visiting professor at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

Pius Langa was the chancellor of the University of Natal from 1998 to 2004 and the first chancellor of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University from 2006 to 2010.

Pius Langa received honorary doctorates from the University of South Africa, University of Zululand, University of the Western Cape, University of Cape Town, Rhodes University, Yale University, National University of Ireland, and Northeastern University, among others.