From the time Mogoeng Mogoeng was appointed Chief Justice to succeed Sandile Ngcobo in September 2011, he was always going to carry the monkey on his back, branding him a lackey of the president.
As with former public protector Thuli Madonsela, Mogoeng moved with speed to prove he was his own man. The highlight of this forthrightness was his seminal March 31, 2016 Constitutional Court judgment on Nkandla.
After this, not even those who refused to see could entertain doubts that the Chief Justice was beholden to no one person but the rule of law.
It is this consistent conduct that has reignited public confidence in the independence of the judiciary.
Another epochal date this year was May 20 when Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke retired from the bench.
But Moseneke’s loss to the law has been cushioned by the emergence of a whole new cadre of black jurists.
A youthful 54, advocate Dali Mpofu is already considered an old hand given his illustrious body of work which, this year, included representing “shock jock” Gareth Cliff in the R25million M-Net lawsuit. Cliff was subsequently reinstated as a judge on Idols South Africa.
Mpofu may well be the “good hands” that Moseneke said he had left the judiciary in on the occasion of his retirement.
But celebrity lawyer Zola Majavu contends “there have always been good lawyers, they are not only emerging now”.
Majavu adds: “There are very decent, very sharp black lawyers who do not get the exposure.”
The exposure he refers to is meaningful work that comes from high-profile clients, which, by extension, would mean extensive media coverage.
And the courts have seen an influx of news cameras into their hallowed halls lately.
It was this year, perhaps as Majavu suggests the media spotlight was shone inside court, that more black faces in robes came to the fore.
Among the shining lights was advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, who acquitted himself very well in the State Capture case.
He is reportedly writing a book on the emergence of black jurists.
Ngcukaitobi has a very colourful CV that includes being the youngest member of the Legal Resources Centre in Grahamstown and his work as a research fellow at Wits University.
Majavu singles out just one of these lodestars - advocate Vuyani Ngalwana, SC, of whom he says: “They are doing well.”
Armed with an LLM from UCT, Ngalwana, a former pension funds adjudicator, is no small fry.
Not afraid to step into the fray, Ngalwana pronounced on many legal issues, among which was his recent call to National Prosecuting Authority head Shaun Abrahams to resign after the disastrous on-off charging of Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan with fraud.
Ngalwana and another prominent black legal mind, advocate
William Mokhari, have often voiced the complaint that the government doesn’t brief black advocates, preferring their white counterparts instead.
No less a person than President Jacob Zuma remarked that his opponents take “razor-sharp lawyers to court” against one’s own pedestrian defence.
Razor-sharp for Zuma, who is known to use white lawyers even in his personal tribulations, could be shorthand for “white”.
Majavu says white law firms have no funding problems as opposed to their black peers who have to scrounge to make ends meet.
“Why am I not operating from Sandton?” he asks rhetorically.
“I can’t afford the rent.”
But he is adamant that, much as he is consistently shown up in court as a result of a lack of resources, “I made a vow that I was not going to merge with any white company; I was going to win or fail as Majavu”.
His argument is that if he was assured of continued work from the government, he would move to a posher business address.
“People want to see lawyers in action. So if you don’t bring the cameras into courts, people won’t know.”
Maybe the news camera has been good to the practice of law but in 2016, especially, the rise of the black jurist has been brought into our psyche.
The one battle left is for the government to brief them more.