Obituary: Pius Langa: Former chief justice

1939-2013: Former Chief Justice Pius Langa, who has died at the age of 74, was a conciliator in the same mould as Nelson Mandela. Like him, he was accused of being too conciliatory. Many who now compete to heap praise on him called him a sellout and a coconut when he was alive.

He was born in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, on March 25 1939, the second of seven siblings. His father was a minister of the charismatic Pentecostal Holiness Church.

In a submission to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), he gave a searing account of what it was like growing up black under apartheid.

His first encounter with the apartheid legal system was as a young jobseeker in Durban in 1956. He experienced "frustration, indignity and humiliation" daily. As a teenager, he was expected to live in a men's hostel. He needed a permit to stay with his parents in the township.

"In that first flush of youth, I had thought I could do anything, aspire to anything and that nothing could stop me," he wrote. "I was wrong."

He spoke about the "insensitive, demeaning and often hostile environment" that apartheid laws and regulations created around him. His early working life was dominated by the pass laws, influx-control regulations and "interminable queues at the end of which, in general, bad-tempered clerks and officials might reward one with some endorsement or other in the 'dompas'".

He spoke of the "painful and degrading" experience of being strip-searched. Worse than being subjected to this himself was seeing his elders being treated like this while trying to maintain a semblance of dignity.

"As a 16-year-old, I remember having to avert my eyes from the nakedness of grown men in a futile attempt to salvage some dignity for them in those queues where we had to expose ourselves to facilitate the degrading examination."

The "ugliness" of the apartheid laws was bad enough. Worse was the "crude, cruel and unfeeling way" they were imposed.

The young man who experienced this and became the country's chief justice never showed any personal rancour. He remained throughout his life the soul of generosity and compassion.

This did not necessarily make him a great chief justice. There were those who felt he lacked the hard edge for that.

He failed to act decisively when it emerged that Western Cape Judge President John Hlophe had received payments from a company, Oasis, that was appearing in his courts.

Hlophe's story was riddled with inconsistencies, but Langa decided not to pursue the matter on the grounds that there was no evidence. Again he failed to act after a senior advocate and an attorney said in sworn affidavits submitted to the JSC that Hlophe had called the attorney a "piece of white sh*t" and told him to go back to Holland. Langa persuaded the lawyers to drop the matter.

Langa made amends when, in 2008, Constitutional Court judges said that Hlophe had tried to influence them in a corruption case related to Jacob Zuma.

In the face of furious opposition from the Black Lawyers' Association, which called him a sellout and a coconut, and from Hlophe himself, who accused him of being part of a political plot against him, Langa was immovable in his determination that this attempt to subvert the judiciary should be dealt with firmly. The Constitutional Court laid a complaint with the Judicial Service Commission and Langa refused to back off. Hlophe is to face a tribunal in September.

As chairman of the JSC, it was felt that Langa allowed politicians on the body to exercise more influence than was appropriate or healthy for the independence of the judiciary. This was a practice that his predecessor, Arthur Chaskalson, had allowed to develop. Langa's failure to address the issue firmly reinforced a pattern that today allows the minister of justice to call the shots on the commission.

Administratively he was sometimes weak. He failed to push through projects such as the critical one on judicial education. As a result, 19 years into the new South Africa there is still no proper functioning judicial training institute. A plan for case-flow management throughout the country was finalised by 2005, but he did not push through with it.

After studying through the University of South Africa, Langa became one of few black advocates prepared to defend ANC activists arrested by the security police. This took great courage because there was nothing they would not do to exact revenge.

Langa's very close friend was the attorney Griffiths Mxenge, who briefed him on a number of cases, including one in which a man was sentenced to five years in jail - and served every day of it - for listening to Radio Freedom. Mxenge was assassinated by a police hit squad.

Langa kept a professional distance from the ANC because he thought it was not in the interests of his clients to be known as an ANC lawyer.

He did not do the glamour cases that attracted publicity and turned some lawyers into stars. He took on run-of-the-mill cases that had little or no publicity value, representing people in remote areas where there were no supporters and no media coverage. His only glamour case was representing Winnie Mandela against charges of kidnapping and assaulting Stompie Moeketsi, after Mandela asked him to defend her.

His life was dogged by tragedy.

In 1984 his brother Ben, who ran an Umkhonto weSizwe unit in KwaZulu-Natal, was shot dead by an ANC hit squad in the Pietermaritzburg township of Edendale after the security police had planted the rumour that he was a spy. Two of the three members of the hit squad were arrested and sentenced to hang. Langa was the president of the National Association of Democratic Lawyers, which opposed the death penalty, and both in this and his personal capacity he campaigned unsuccessfully to save them from the gallows.

As deputy chief justice, he went on to write a seminal judgment against capital punishment.

He went to Lusaka to find answers to his brother's assassination. He met with Oliver Tambo and Chris Hani. They agreed to investigate, established that Ben had never been a spy and apologised. Thabo Mbeki repeated the apology at the TRC.

In 2009 he lost his wife, Beauty, to illness. Several years before that, his son Vusi was killed in a car accident in his late 20s.

Langa is survived by five children.