Henry Allan Fagan, QC (4 April 1889 – 6 December 1963) was the Chief Justice of South Africa from 1957 to 1959 and previously a Member of Parliament and the Minister of Native Affairs in J.

[5] His father was a lawyer and amateur poet, and kept a vast collection of books at the family's Cape Dutch residence (now a National Monument) on Kerk Straat, including leading works of theology and English literature.

[1][4] He hoped (like many of his peers) to be a minister of religion, and went to the seminary in Stellenbosch; but his father's long-standing wish was that he would become a barrister, and continued to pay for private lessons in law.

[2][4] He also lent editorial supervision to the Pers's family magazine Die Huisgenoot, of which his uncle J. J. Smith was the first editor, and translated the works of Theodor Storm into Afrikaans.

[5] Though Fagan's practice had become very reputable, and he had been appointed a King's Counsel in 1927, he was "bitten by the political bug" after Hertzog's National Party achieved electoral success.

[3] Just a year later, however, Hertzog left the United Party in protest at Smuts' decision, in the face of clamant calls for neutrality from Afrikaans-speakers, to take the country into War in support of Britain, and Fagan "felt bound to go with him into the political wilderness".

[6] Unsurprisingly given his previous professorial appointment, Fagan was a "great exponent of Roman-Dutch law",[1] and his best-known judgments were those which dealt closely with the old authorities like Voet and the Digest.

[3] It therefore recommended that 'influx control' measures be relaxed, allowing black South Africans to move to cities with relative freedom and the incremental integration of the races.

[7] And a declaration signed by a prominent group of Stellenbosch academics angrily pointed out that if Fagan's racial integration were allowed this would lead inevitably to gelykstelling (social levelling) and, as a result of pressure to give blacks equal civil rights, the political marginalisation of the white population; the upshot would be the death of the Afrikaner volk.

[3] Though they were angry, the Nationalists had not been caught unprepared: in fact, Malan had already set up a rival commission headed by his closest confidante, Paul Sauer, and staffed by three NP parliamentarians, and which had reported in 1947.

[3] The Sauer Commission had given added detail and heft to the Nationalists' policy of apartheid, recommending that influx control measures be strengthened to prevent any mixing between the races, with black people consigned to the reserves.

Despite the uncongenial report of his Commission, the Malan government was willing to elevate Fagan to the Appellate Division, the country's highest court, in October 1950, to replace the departed Chief Justice Watermeyer.

[11] Centlivres had stood firm, in the Harris v Minister of the Interior cases, against the Nationalists' first attempts to strip coloured voters in the Cape Province of their right to vote, which was constitutionally entrenched in the South Africa Act.

But virtually his last act as a judge was finally to relent, in Collins v Minister of the Interior, and to give legal sanction to the disenfranchisement, which the National Party, now led by J. G. Strydom after Malan's death, had secured by packing the Senate.

[7] That left Fagan, untainted by any association with Harris and with clear Afrikaner and Nationalist ties, who was offered the post by Minister of Justice C. R.

[7] In a letter to Swart, Fagan said he was faced with "a very difficult choice", noting his concerns about superseding the more senior Schreiner and the obvious implication that the offer was politically motivated.

[7] When Fagan's judicial career ended in 1959, he re-entered politics, and became a strong opponent of the National Party's increasingly conservative policies under Hendrik Verwoerd.

[1] His remarks on the government's racial policy, serialized in the largest Afrikaans newspaper, Die Landstem, were hailed for "breaking the facade of Nationalist unity" and finally sparking an effective opposition to apartheid from within the establishment.

[5] The party was intended to provide a home for Nationalist supporters who refused to tolerate Strydom's disregard for constitutional principles (particularly during the coloured vote crisis, as Fagan well knew).

[17] The NU soon fizzled out, and Fagan spent his final years as a Senator for the United Party, continuing to argue publicly for racial conciliation, now in the Johannesburg Star.

[5] That assessment was self-serving, but undoubtedly Fagan's views were more conservative than other critics of the government, like Alan Paton's Liberal Party, and did not question the fact that South Africa's white population ought to be preserved and indeed preferred.