Page 32 - SARB: 100-Year Journey

Politics surrounding the founding of the SARB
The founding of the SARB followed the unification of the country’s four colonies: the Cape, Natal, Free State and Transvaal. Collectively, these colonies were amalgamated to constitute the Union of South Africa on 31 May 1910.
But it was not the government of General Louis Botha, an Afrikaner resistance fighter in the Second Boer War (1899–1902) who became the Union’s first Prime Minister from 1910 until 1919, which argued for the formation of a central bank. That task fell on General Jan Smuts, another Boer leader.
It was Smuts’s government that gave impetus to the establishment of a central bank.
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British economist John Maynard Keynes (left) and General Jan Smuts. /Oxford University Press