Union of South Africa

On May 31, 1910, four British colonies, the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony, were joined into a single state, the Union of South Africa. The date fell exactly eight years after the Treaty of Vereeniging ended the South African War between Britain and the two Boer republics. The new country was a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, with its own parliament and cabinet. Its first prime minister was Louis Botha, a former Boer general, with another former general, Jan Smuts, as one of his leading ministers. Africans made up about 80 percent of the population, but political power rested with the white minority.³⁴⁵

After the war, the British high commissioner Alfred Milner worked to rebuild the economy of the former republics, especially the gold mines of the Witwatersrand. A government commission reporting in 1905 recommended separating Black and white landownership and creating segregated urban 'locations' for Africans, ideas that shaped segregation laws over the following decades. In 1908 and 1909 a National Convention met to draft a constitution. Every delegate was white, and African, Coloured and Indian South Africans were excluded from the talks that decided their future. The delegates chose a single unitary state rather than a federation and made English and Dutch the official languages. The British Parliament passed their draft as the South Africa Act of 1909.¹²³

The vote was the most divisive issue. The Transvaal and the Orange River Colony insisted on an all-white electorate, while the Cape had a qualified franchise open to men of any color who met property or income tests. The compromise kept each colony's existing rules, so the Cape's non-racial vote survived, but only white men could sit in the new Parliament. Even in the Cape, about 85 percent of voters in 1910 were white. A delegation that included the former Cape prime minister W. P. Schreiner travelled to London to protest the color bar, without success. In 1912 educated Africans founded the South African Native National Congress, later renamed the African National Congress, partly in response. Historians commonly see the union as a settlement that reconciled Boer and British whites while shutting the Black majority out of power, a pattern that later segregation and apartheid laws built upon.¹³⁴