Despite having relied on African co-operation for their victory in the Anglo-Boer War and having hinted at enhanced rights for blacks after the war, the British excluded blacks from the cosy deal between Afrikaners and Britain that resulted in the unification of South Africa in 1910. It wasn't long, in fact, before the white Union government began eroding African rights. In response, a group of middle-class mission-educated Africans formed the South African Native National Congress (later to become the ANC) in 1912. The founders weren't interested in overthrowing the white government; they simply wanted recognition by white society. Middle-class blacks already enjoyed the vote in the Cape Province (now the Western, Northern and Eastern capes) on the basis of a qualified franchise according to education and property ownership, and the early African leaders wanted this to be extended to the rest of the country. Taking as their model the evolutionary growth of democracy in Britain, they hoped that this would eventually lead to universal suffrage.

 

In 1914, the leaders set off as a deputation for London, to protest against the 1913 Natives' Land Act , which severely restricted property ownership by blacks. The trip was unsuccessful and the Land Act came into force, providing the legal foundation stone for the subsequent formalization of apartheid some 35 years later. The Act provided for the division of South Africa into distinct African and white areas, with blacks - despite constituting the overriding majority of the population - confined to less than ten percent of the land surface.

Through the early half of the twentieth century, the ANC remained a conservative organization, unwilling to engage in active protest. This led to accusations that its leaders were "good boys tied to the apron strings of the white liberals". In response, a number of alternative mass organizations arose. Among the largest was the mighty Industrial and Commercial Union , an African trade union founded in 1919, which at its peak in 1928 had gathered an impressive 150,000 members. But in the 1930s it ran out of steam. The first political movement in the country not organized along ethnic lines was the South African Communist Party , which was founded in 1921 with a multiracial executive. While it never itself gained widespread membership, it became an important force inside the ANC.

Throughout the 1930s, the ANC plodded on with speeches, petitions and pleas, which proved completely fruitless. They suffered a major setback in 1936 with the termination of the African franchise in the Cape Province. TheANC's response was to send a deputation to Prime Minister Hertzog to protest; Hertzog treated them abominably, not even offering them seats. These events left the ANC crippled and hobbling impotently into the 1940s.

World War II split Afrikanerdom. There were those like Prime Minister Jan Smuts who stood firmly in favour of joining the war alongside Britain. But for others, like John Vorster , Britain was the old enemy, so they supported Germany, some signing up with the Ossewa Brandwag (the "Ox-Wagon Torch Commando"), which carried out sabotage against the government. After the war there were hopes of reform from Prime Minister Smuts, who at the time was playing a leading role in the formation of the United Nations . Smuts even had a part in penning the Preamble to the Charter on Human Rights, but while his work for abstract "human rights" earned him a statue next to Winston Churchill outside Britain's parliament, he was in no hurry to grant such rights to the majority of South Africans. Even conservative African leaders were losing patience: one, Councillor Paul Mosaka, complaining that "we have been asked to co-operate with a toy telephone. We have been speaking into an apparatus which cannot transmit sound."