Jan Steyn

When he retired as president of the Court of Appeal of Lesotho in 2008, Steyn was accorded a knighthood by King Letsie III.

In 1990 he was appointed to the Lesotho Court of Appeal where he served eight years as a member and subsequently 11 years as president. He also served for seven years on the Botswana Court of Appeal and until 2007 as a Judge of Appeal of Swaziland’s highest Court.

When making his now famous address on 2 February 1990 the then President FW de Klerk, when announcing the release of Nelson Mandela and the lifting of political restrictions, also announced the allocation of R2 billion for development to be administered by the Independent Development Trust (IDT) chaired by Jan Steyn. This initiative was launched after he obtained the unequivocal support of black leadership at the time, especially and including the late former president Nelson Mandela. Steyn insisted that government (which at the time was the National Party government) would have no say as to how the money would be spent.

In 1981 he married Ann Steyn, who later became the president international of Reach to Recovery, an international volunteer breast cancer NGO.

Steyn headed up the Urban Foundation from 1977. The Urban Foundation was a non-profit organisation founded and funded by business-leaders who were determined that the country avoid the collision course it was on. It identified initiatives which could facilitate access to housing, quality education and business opportunities for urban black communities. Funding was provided by domestic and international business. In this way the Urban Foundation played a major role in improving the day-to-day lives of hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged South Africans.

After the Soweto uprising of 1976 Jan Steyn was instrumental in organising a summit of black urban leaders such as Nthato Motlana and industrialists led by Harry Oppenheimer and Anton Rupert. From this the Urban Foundation was born.

At the time, black people in South Africa had no claim to land title in "white" urban areas: "their very residence there was on sufferance", under section 10 of the Bantu Urban Areas Act. "The fiction was that they were mere sojourners, with home and heart in the archipelago of Bantustans, to which (from 1976) 'independence' was being granted."

Steyn was also involved in several public interest bodies as chairperson, trustee and/or member, among them the National Institute for Crime Prevention and the Re-Integration of Offenders (NICRO), the Legal Resources Centre, the Old Mutual Unclaimed Shares Trust, Communicare, the Community Chest of the Western Cape, the Abe Bailey Trust, the National Botanical Institute (now the South African National Biodiversity Institute), and the Media Council. He served on the Board of Directors of Anglo American plc, Barloworld Limited, First National Bank, Metropolitan Life and Vergelegen and founded the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1970.

He married Audrey Steyn (née Tarleton) in 1951, and they had four children.

Jan Steyn was admitted to the Cape Bar in 1950, after clerking for the late chief justice Newton Ogilvie Thompson. He was appointed as a Judge of the then Supreme Court of South Africa (Cape Provincial Division) at the young age of 36 in March 1964. He served permanently on the bench until March 1977 when he was called to head the Urban Foundation, resigning from the South African bench in 1981.

Jan Steyn attended Jan van Riebeeck High School and graduated from Stellenbosch University with a BA LLB in 1949.

Jan Hendrik Steyn (known as Jan) (4 March 1928 – 30 December 2013) was a South African judge, a development leader and campaigner for social justice. He was an advocate for justice and equality in The Republic of South Africa and served South Africa and several Southern African Development Community countries, in the highest capacity in the fields of law and development. In recognition of his service he was awarded honorary doctorates from five South African universities.

Jan Steyn was born in Cape Town to Zerilda (née Minnaar) and Hendrik (HPM) Steyn on 4 March 1928. His mother was a pioneer of social welfare in South Africa, founding the Urban Housing League.

His father, HPM Steyn, joined the Boer commandos during the Anglo-Boer War at the age of 13, and thereafter finished schooling when he was 24 years old. He became a gifted scholar in literature and theology at Victoria College, Stellenbosch, and later Princeton. He joined the Dutch Reformed Church ministry from 1917 to 1922. From 1922 to 1955 he was the tireless secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society and due to his extensive work in this regard was also known as "Bible Steyn". According to one of the key translators of the Bible into Afrikaans, dr J D Kestell, HPM Steyn was the real force behind this translation process. He also facilitated the translation of the Bible into many other languages, including Xhosa, Herero and Tswana.