Yvonne Mokgoro

It was the early 1970s, in South Africa.

The police arrested a young man. They charged him with loitering. A student stepped in.

The police arrested her too. She was charged with obstruction of justice. She spent a weekend in detention.

Her lawyer was Robert Sobukwe.

The student's name was Yvonne Mokgoro. Later, she would study law.

She was born on October 19, 1950, in the township of Galeshewe, in Kimberley. As a child, she wanted to be a teacher or a nurse, like the nuns at her Catholic school.

Her road to the law passed through many jobs. Nursing assistant. Salesperson. Clerk in the Department of Justice of Bophuthatswana.

Then came the law degrees, at the University of Bophuthatswana, then at the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, as a Fulbright scholar.

She was a prosecutor in Mmabatho. Then she taught law and became an associate professor. She studied human rights and customary law, and what they changed for women and children.

On October 13, 1994, Nelson Mandela appointed the first eleven justices of the new Constitutional Court.

Yvonne Mokgoro was among them. She became the first Black woman judge in South Africa. For most of her tenure, only two women sat on the Court.

The first major case came in 1995: S v Makwanyane. The question: can a state execute those it condemns?

The Court said no. The death penalty was declared unconstitutional.

In it, Yvonne Mokgoro defended one word: ubuntu.

She tied it to a saying: umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. A person is a person through other people. For her, ubuntu was:

She followed that thread for fifteen years.

With the Court, she ruled in the Khosa case that permanent residents, too, had a right to social grants. In the Jaftha case, the Court found it unconstitutional to sell homes over small debts.

From 1995 to 2011, she also chaired the South African Law Reform Commission.

In October 2009, she left the Court, after fifteen years. That same year, she received the Order of the Baobab. She became the founding chair of the council of Sol Plaatje University, in her home city of Kimberley.

In 2013, she gave young law graduates a piece of advice. Just two words: "Be present."

In 2021, the UN named her among the experts charged with advancing racial justice in law enforcement.

Yvonne Mokgoro died on May 9, 2024, at the age of seventy-three.

That word, ubuntu, she defended in the law of an entire country.

What remains is the image of a student who one day stepped toward a stranger being arrested.