Daniel F. Malan

Daniel F. Malan (born May 22, 1874, near Riebeeck West, Cape Colony [now in Western Cape, S.Af.]—died Feb. 7, 1959, Stellenbosch, S.Af.) was a statesman and politician who formed South Africa’s first exclusively Afrikaner government and instituted the policy of apartheid (the enforced segregation of nonwhites from whites).

Malan was educated at Victoria College, Stellenbosch, and at the University of Utrecht, Neth., where he received a doctorate in divinity in 1905. He returned to the Cape to enter the ministry of the Dutch Reformed Church. Always a vigorous exponent of Afrikaner aspirations and the use of the Afrikaans language, Malan left the pulpit in 1915 to edit Die Burger, a Cape Town newspaper that supported the National Party, which had been founded by J.B.M. Hertzog the previous year.

On entering Parliament in 1918, Malan soon demonstrated considerable talent, especially as a forceful speaker. The following year he became a member of the delegation that went to the Versailles Peace Conference to request independence for South Africa on the basis of self-determination. In 1924 he joined Hertzog’s Cabinet as minister of the interior. While holding that post he instituted laws that established a South African nationality and a flag and recognized Afrikaans as an official language of the Union, replacing Dutch (sometimes referred to as Netherlandic), from which it had evolved. (Formerly only English and Dutch had been used officially.) When Hertzog’s National Party merged with Jan Smuts’s South African Party in 1934, Malan left the government and founded the Purified National Party, which became the official opposition.

Malan’s Purified National Party voted (unsuccessfully) to keep South Africa out of World War II in September 1939. Hertzog, who also favoured neutrality, soon reconciled with Malan, and the two formed the Re-united National Party in late 1939. Differences between the two leaders reemerged, and Hertzog and others eventually withdrew because of the Malan’s group’s republicanism and their equivocation over permitting British South Africans equal rights with Afrikaners, and a group of Hertzog’s supporters, led by N.C. Havenga, formed the Afrikaner Party in 1941. Malan’s Re-united National Party won 43 seats in the House of Assembly in the 1943 election. In the 1948 election the Re-united National Party, in alliance with the smaller Afrikaner Party, appealed to Afrikaner and British racial sentiments and managed to win a narrow majority in the House of Assembly. This enabled Malan to form the first exclusively Afrikaner government of South Africa.

From 1948 until the time of his retirement in late 1954, Malan’s administration was preoccupied with establishing absolute apartheid. His objective was to secure white (particularly Afrikaner) rule for all time. The basic components of his strategy were the full separation of the racial groups (as defined under apartheid policies) in South Africa, including the establishment of separate residential and business sections in urban areas for each race, the ban on sexual relations between the races, the establishment of separate educational standards that disadvantaged black Africans, the removal of the Natives (black Africans) Representative Council, and the disenfranchisement of Coloured (mixed race) people. The government’s attempt to remove Coloured people from the common voting rolls of Cape Province in 1951 was declared invalid by the courts in 1952, so Malan bade his time, working to build broader support, which became nearer after the National Party increased its majority in the 1953 elections.

Malan’s resignation in November 1954 was timed so that Havenga would be his successor as prime minister. The bid was foiled by the supporters of the more extreme Johannes Gerhardus Strijdom, who succeeded Malan as head of the National Party and then assumed the office of prime minister. Strijdom and later successors continued to implement the apartheid policies begun in Malan’s administration.