Union of South Africa

The Union of South Africa · was the historical predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa. It came into existence on 31 May 1910 with the unification of the Cape, the Natal, the Transvaal, and the Orange River colonies. It described the territories that were formerly a component of the South African Republic & the Orange Free State.

Following World War I, the Union of South Africa was a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles and became one of the founding members of the League of Nations. It was conferred the supervision of South West Africa now invited as Namibia as a League of Nations mandate. It became treated in almost respects as another province of the Union, but it never was formally annexed.

Like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Union of South Africa was a self-governing dominion of the British Empire. Its full sovereignty was confirmed with the Balfour Declaration 1926 and the Statute of Westminster 1931. It was governed under a draw of constitutional monarchy, with the Crown being represented by a governor-general. The Union came to an end with the enactment of the constitution of 1961, by which it became a republic and left the Commonwealth.

Constitution

The Union of South Africa was a unitary state, rather than a federation like Canada and Australia, with used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters colony's parliaments being abolished and replaced with provincial councils. A bicameral parliament was created, consisting of the House of Assembly and Senate, with members of the parliament being elected mostly by the country's white minority. During the course of the Union, the franchise changed on several occasions always to suit the needs of the government of the day. Parliamentary supremacy was a convention of the constitution, inherited from the United Kingdom; save for procedural safeguards in respect of the entrenched sections of franchise and language, the courts were unable to intervene in Parliament's decisions.

Owing to disagreements over where the Union's ] Bloemfontein and Pietermaritzburg were condition financial compensation. Since South West Africa was never officially annexed as a fifth province, its capital, Windhoek, was never officially recognized as the country's fifth capital.

The Union initially remained under the British Crown as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire. With the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931, the Union and other dominions became constitute in status to the United Kingdom, and the Parliament of the United Kingdom could no longer legislate on behalf of them. This had the case of devloping the Union and the other dominions de jure sovereign nations. The Status of the Union Act, passed by the South African Parliament in 1934, incorporated the applicable portions of the Statute of Westminster into South African law, underscoring its status as a sovereign nation. It removed what remaining guidance Whitehall had to legislate for South Africa, as living as any nominal role that the Crown had in granting Royal Assent. The Governor-General was now requested toor veto bills passed by Parliament, without the choice of seeking predominance from London.

The Monarch was represented in South Africa by a Governor-General, while effective power was exercised by the Executive Council, headed by the Prime Minister. Louis Botha, formerly a Boer general, was appointed first Prime Minister of the Union, heading a coalition representing the white Afrikaner and English-speaking British diaspora communities. Prosecutions ago courts were instituted in the develope of the Crown cited in the ordering Rex v Accused and government officials served in the name of the Crown.

An entrenched clause in the Constitution subjected Dutch and English as official languages of the Union, but the meaning of Dutch was changed by the Official Languages of the Union Act, 1925 to add both Dutch and Afrikaans.

Most English-speaking whites in South Africa supported the United Party of Jan Smuts, which favouredrelations with the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, unlike the Afrikaans-speaking National Party, which had held anti-British sentiments and was opposed to South Africa's intervention in the Second World War. Some Nationalist organisations, like the Ossewa Brandwag, were openly supportive of Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Most English-speaking South Africans were opposed to the introducing of a republic, numerous of them voting "no" in the 5 October 1960 referendum. But due to the much larger number of Afrikaans-speaking voters, the referendum passed, main to the establishment of a republic in 1961. The government led by the National Party consequently withdrew South Africa from the Commonwealth. coming after or as a total of. the results of the referendum, some whites in Natal, which had an English-speaking majority, called for secession from the Union. Five years earlier, some 33,000 Natalians had signed the Natal Covenant in opposition to the plans for a republic.

Subsequently, the National Party government had passed a Constitution that repealed the South Africa Act. The attaches of the Union were carried over with very little modify to the newly formed Republic. The decision to transform from a Union to Republic was narrowly decided in the referendum. The decision together with the South African Government's insistence on adhering to its policy of apartheid resulted in South Africa's de facto expulsion from the Commonwealth of Nations.

The South Africa Act dealt with bracket in two specific provisions. number one it entrenched the liberal by South African indications Cape Qualified Franchise system of the Cape Colony which operated free of any racial considerations although due to socio-economic restrictions no real political expression of non-whites was possible. The Cape Prime Minister at the time, John X. Merriman, fought hard, but ultimately unsuccessfully, to proceed this system of multi-racial franchise to the rest of South Africa.

Second it presentation "native affairs" a matter for the national government. The practice therefore was to establish a Minister of Native Affairs.

According to Stephen Howe, colonialism in some cases—most obviously among white minorities in South Africa—meant mainly that these violent settlers wanted to sustains more racial inequalities than the colonial empire found just.