THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT, SOUTH AFRICA AND NELSON MANDELA
The sorrow and adulation that the world has expressed following the recent death of Nelson Mandela are a worthy tribute to his greatness. Last Monday the British parliament added its voice to the global chorus. It was appropriate - because it was the same parliament that set the course for South Africa's future history when it created the Union of South Africa only 103 years ago. In so doing it set the stage on which Nelson Mandela - who was born only eight years later - would play out his extraordinary career.
Modern South Africa was forged in the wars of conquest that the British fought during the nineteenth century against the three dominant peoples of the sub-continent - Mandela's people, the Xhosas; Zuma's people, the Zulus; and my people, the Afrikaners.
At the beginning of the twentieth century Britain found itself in possession of an assortment of vexatious territories in Southern Africa - that one historian quipped it had acquired in ‘a fit of absent-mindedness'. Its solution was to create a union or federation along the lines of the recently established federations in Canada and Australia. A National Convention was assembled in 1908 and reached agreement on a draft constitution which was adopted by the British parliament in September 1909 as the South Africa Act.
The South Africa Act established the political framework for the following 84 years - most notably because it failed to protect the rights of non-white South Africans. As Keir Hardie, the Scottish Socialist leader, observed, its purpose was "to unify the white races, to disenfranchise the coloured races and not to promote union between the races of South Africa".
On 31 May 1910, nine months after having been conceived in sin, the Union of South Africa was born. Like so many other imperial creations in Africa its artificial borders encompassed widely disparate peoples with divergent interests. However, the South Africa Act, at the avid insistence of the white national groups, put them firmly in control of the new country by making the white-elected parliament sovereign.