When these men - around a decade her junior - were wandering out of law school with their diplomas, she was working as a clerk, or a messenger or a tea girl, getting progressively angrier about how little access to opportunity she had, about the injustice all around her.
She has, in the long months she has been sitting there, listening with her head rested on what looks to be an arthritic hand, interrupting very rarely, given no clue as to what she thinks while she strives to arrive at what might be the truth about what happened between the athlete and his model girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in the middle of the night on a gated, guarded estate built to keep the likes of her out.
Her childhood home in Orlando East, Soweto, was not unlike and not far from Nelson and Winnie Mandela's old township house. She is the eldest of 10 children, of whom only three remain. Five died in childhood, and another brother was stabbed to death in his 20s.
They slept three to a room, and she spent her days keeping lookout for police while her grandfather brewed beer in the garden.
She graduated from the law school at the University of South Africa in 1990, when she was 43, a few months before Mandela's release. Matilda Masipa is still known as "Tilly" to those who knew her when she was younger. Thokozile, her Zulu name emerged - as it did for many in the struggle - some time in the aftermath of the night she spent on the cold floor of a prison cell, covered for warmth in pages of her own newspaper. The background to that incident is instructive. By 1974 she had managed to get a BA in social work, and then a job as a junior reporter at the World newspaper, until it was banned in 1977. By all accounts quiet and hard-working, she moved to the Post, as editor of its woman's section.
When that paper, too, was being suppressed, she and other journalists marched in Johannesburg and ended up in the cells, sleeping next to a filthy toilet they would not clean. It took the intervention of the newspaper's white owners, who needed their staff back, to secure their release.
In 1998, she became only the second black woman judge appointed to the High Court and two of her previous rulings have been near constantly discussed.
One is her exploitation of a narrow constitutional avenue to hand a 252-year sentence to a serial rapist, noting in her judgment that the victims had been attacked "in the sanctity of their own homes where they thought they were safe".
The other was the life sentence given to a police officer who shot his estranged wife as they argued over their divorce settlement. "You deserve to go to jail for life because you are not a protector. You are a killer," she told him. These cases have been deployed many times over the past six months to paint a picture of a judge especially impassioned by crimes against women. Her interpretation will be crucial, but there is nothing concrete to suggest that her defence of women trumps what those who know her say is her principal interest - in fairness, in justice.
In those two cases, the facts were beyond doubt. This one, by the manner of Steenkamp's death, shot through a locked door behind which she could not be seen, is more complex.
Of course, Masipa's verdict does not change what happened in those horrifying moments on February 14 last year. On Thursday, she must finally reveal what thoughts have been whirring all along behind that kind but unreadable face.
- Independent
