This article appeared in The Observer on 10 August 2014.

Once a tea girl, a nursing assistant and a journalist imprisoned for her beliefs, the woman who will pass judgment on Oscar Pistorius's fate has retired to consider her verdict. For 41 days, Judge Thokozile Masipa has presided over proceedings in Courtroom GD: the accused's tears, verbal scraps between the two white Afrikaans attorneys trying to convince her of their arguments, calling everyone to quiet order. Everyone calls her "m'lady".

Stern, but inscrutable, the 66-year-old has listened to reams of evidence, her head resting on an arthritic hand. Now she must decide if she believes the Paralympian shot and killed his girlfriend in a case of mistaken identity on Valentine's morning last year of if, as the prosecution asserts, he's guilty of premeditated murder. She will deliver her judgment on 11 September.

However, despite having become a recognisable figure in her red robe on the world's television screens, Judge Masipa remains an intensely private woman. Suzette Naude, her soft-spoken court registrar, says the judge doesn't even confide in her. "I don't know what she thinks about the case. She hasn't discussed any of her views with me at all," she said. Asked about Masipa's pronounced limp – she examined evidence in court on the supporting arm of an orderly – Naude shakes her head. "She once told me it was a broken femur, but others say it was childhood polio. No one really knows."

The judge arrives in a Mercedes at Pretoria's face-brick high court each morning as the winter sun is coming up, driven from her home in Midrand by her secretary because she doesn't drive herself. By 6.30am, she is at her desk, poring over the day's documents, more than two hours before any other judge.

Friends describe her as religious, health conscious and hard working. "Once you come in here and become a permanent judge, you begin to see that you spend most of your life here, instead of home," Masipa once said.

Usually based in the Johannesburg high court, which has the highest case burden in the country, she jokes that even her four grandchildren need to make appointments to see her. Her husband, a tax consultant, does the cooking.

This piece appeared on Yahoo Sports on 2 April 2014.

PRETORIA, South Africa

On the night Oscar Pistorius fired four bullets through a locked bathroom door, claiming he feared an intruder was on the other side, his non-descript luxury house, with its putty-colored walls and neat lawn, was fitted with an alarm system and motion-detector beams that swept across his garden. The home also housed two pit bulls and the subdivision had a 24-hour security service on patrol.

So serious about security is Silver Woods estate, the subdivision where Pistorius lived, that even the movements of guards are tracked. To ensure they're doing rounds and not just pretending, guards are required to swipe an electronic key at specific checkpoints throughout the night.

Yet, as Pistorius tells it, all of those safety measures still failed to allay his panic on Valentine's Day last year, when he shot and killed his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.

While this fear may appear irrational outside the South African borders, inside them it's pervasive. So deeply engrained in South African society is this fear that the "imaginary intruder" appears as a recurring character in various accounts of violent crimes, even if its presence is entirely irrational.

On March 27, a 17-year-old South African boy was found guilty for the murder of a beautiful blonde girl named Marthella Steenkamp (no relation to Reeva), whom he shot dead.

The boy denied all charges, insisting for two years that there must have been an intruder in the house who carried out the crime; that he, too, was a victim of the attack.

Wrapping the young man's account of that evening around the fear of crime that persists throughout the country of South Africa, the trial hinged on answering the question: Was he a murderer or a victim?

In the coming weeks, Judge Thokozile Masipa will attempt to answer a similar question inside Courtroom GD when reaching a verdict in the trial of the country's most famous athlete: Did Oscar Pistorius murder Reeva Steenkamp or did he mistakenly believe he was the victim of a home invasion?

It is undisputed that Pistorius shot deliberately through a closed door, four times, knowing that he would kill or seriously injure whomever was on the other side, regardless of who was there.

Public fury has been unleashed at the possibility of a man who murdered his lover in cold blood; yet there has been little anger directed toward Pistorius for wanting to maim or kill the imaginary intruder, whom he had yet to even see.

A version of this article appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Melbourne Age on 16 June 2013.

BY NASTASYA TAY in JOHANNESBURG

Sunrise over Alexandra township is an unimposing affair. 

Night gently rolls itself away, revealing a rust coloured smudge of wood-fire haze, hanging on the horizon above the hundreds of silhouetted bodies silently walking to work along narrow streets.

Every morning, on their chilly commute, they pass newspaper headlines hanging from lampposts. In the last year, they have spoken of the 34 miners shot by police at a platinum mine in Marikana, the Mozambican taxi driver found dead in his cell after he was dragged by a police car, the secret millions spent on upgrading the President’s homestead, the young girl gang raped and killed in Cape Town, the model shot dead by  her Paralympian boyfriend and the debates about gun crime and domestic abuse that followed. 

Over the past week, the posters have given daily updates of former President Nelson Mandela’s health, declaring it to be “serious, but stable” after he was hospitalised for a recurrent lung infection. 

“Alex”, as its residents call it, is one of Johannesburg’s oldest informal settlements, a natural starting point for those who’ve arrived in the big city, seeking their fortune. It is where Mandela found a home, decades ago, when he arrived in town as a young legal clerk.

There have been some recent improvements. 

In recent years, a concrete block with vast glass windows has appeared on the edge of the township, casting shadows on the neat new rows of state-funded homes, solar water heaters on corrugated iron roofs. 

It is a promise fulfilled: a Gautrain station, a high-speed rail service connecting Alex and her affluent suburban neighbours to the cities they lie between, Pretoria and downtown Johannesburg. The train has been running since 2010, after the theft of precious copper cables drew it to a halt in its first days. 

The walk between platforms offers a view of South Africa’s newfound diversity: to the right, the gleaming office blocks and mall towers of Sandton, some of the country’s most expensive prime real estate, mosque minarets, an industrial park; to the left, a few rows of government-sponsored housing masking a sprawling, litter-strewn squatter camp on the banks of the Jukskei River. 

It’s three degrees at dawn. 

On the platforms, there are no blue overalls, no menial labourers, gardeners, factory workers. They can’t afford to take the train, so they walk. 

A version of this article appeared in The Independent on 7 June 2013. 

Johannesburg, SOUTH AFRICA

He is everywhere. A mural on a dusty wall outside a Soweto church, echoing his stained-glass likeness inside. A disproportionate enormous bronze likeness, standing sentry over a posh Johannesburg shopping mall. A face gazing over the windblown fields of KwaZulu Natal where he was arrested, assembled out of lasercut metal strips by a local artist. On road signs. On bridges. In school books. On t-shirts, clocks and coasters. In the country’s collective consciousness.

There is perhaps a sad irony that the family of Tata Mandela - the “father of the nation” - whose face graces South Africa’s new banknotes, is now fighting over cash. 

Former President Nelson Mandela’s name is worth marketing millions, yet a battle over the proceeds of his painted handprints is dividing his family, and his dream of a children’s hospital remains yet unfulfilled. 

Mr Mandela, the man who led South Africa’s fight for freedom against the racist apartheid regime, represented possibility, the hope for a more equal South Africa, but the country remains one of the most economically disparate in the world. 

In a country where, according to a recent report, corruption cost the economy nearly 1 billion rand (£70,000) last year alone, and government leaders appear to be confronting scandal after scandal, trust is ebbing. 

For many South Africans, recent reports that Mr Mandela’s children want to sue him for their share of his legacy, whilst their 94-year-old father recovers at home from a bout of pneumonia, drag the country’s moral compass to a new low.