A VETERAN member of Namibia’s judiciary, Judge John Manyarara, died in Windhoek on Friday.
Manyarara died at the age of 79. He had been ill since April, and was starting with chemotherapy for leukaemia shortly before his death.
Manyarara served as an acting judge of Namibia’s High Court from mid-September 2000 until his retirement at the end of November last year.In late April he was however again appointed as an acting judge from May 16 to the end of July this year.Manyarara was born at Mutare in Zimbabwe. He obtained permanent residence in Namibia in October 2004.He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree at Rhodes University in South Africa in 1959. Having worked as a journalist and journalism teacher in the then Rhodesia and Zambia, he later went on to study law in the United Kingdom. In July 1973 he qualified as a barrister through Gray’s Inn in London. He was admitted as a barrister in the High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division, in London in November 1974.Two months before Zimbabwe’s independence on April 18 1980, Manyarara was also admitted as an advocate of the High Court of Zimbabwe.He then practiced law in Zimbabwe until being appointed as a judge of the High Court of Zimbabwe in October 1983, and served in that position until January 1987, when he was appointed as a judge of appeal of the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe. He retired from the Zimbabwean judiciary in 1992.An advocate for free speech and media freedom, Manyarara was the founding chairperson of the Trust Fund Board of the Media Institute of Southern Africa (Misa) from 1994 to September 2000. Misa’s annual John Manyarara Investigative Journalism Awards are named in his honour.In his time on the bench of the High Court in Namibia, the most high-profile and also most challenging case Manyarara dealt with was probably the second Caprivi high treason trial, which started before him on September 19 2005 and was concluded on August 8 2007.In that trial, twelve residents of the Caprivi Region were accused of having been involved in a plot to violently secede the Caprivi Region from Namibia. After a trial that was repeatedly disrupted by the accused men, who tested Acting Judge Manyarara’s patience to its limit, Manyarara convicted ten of them of high treason on July 31 2007. He sentenced three of them to 30 years’ imprisonment each on August 8 2007, while the other seven were sentenced to 32-year jail terms each.On July 3 last year, he granted the ten sentenced men leave to appeal to the Supreme Court against their sentences.On occasion he also served as an acting judge of appeal of Namibia’s Supreme Court. In this capacity, he was part of the five-judge bench that ordered Government in June 2002 to provide legal aid to the people charged in the main Caprivi high treason trial.After his retirement from the bench in Namibia, Manyarara made a return to the High Court – although not in person – last month in an application in which he was asking to be admitted as a legal practitioner in Namibia. That would have enabled him to continue practicing law from the other side of the bench where he had been presiding over cases for more than nine years. Due to his illness, the admission application was postponed.Manyarara is survived by four daughters.In a statement issued yesterday, Chief Justice Peter Shivute announced that a memorial service for Manyarara will be held at the Methodist Church of Southern Africa in Windhoek, at the corner of Kasino and Lüderitz Streets, at 16h30 tomorrow.
