Page 78 - SARB: 100-Year Journey

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The advent of apartheid
The gold standard controversy was not the only significant event that occurred between 1931 and 1932. In Great Britain, Parliament passed the Statute of Westminster, a product of the Imperial Conferences of 1926 and 1930. The statute removed British legal authority over the Union of South Africa and other dominions of the British Empire. The statute “lays down in most authoritative and official terms that the Parliament of South Africa is a sovereign body.” (General Smuts in the Rand Daily Mail, 9 December 1932). Discriminatory laws had been in existence for three decades in the Union, but the passage of the statute bolstered Afrikaner nationalism.
The dominions had quasi-independent status in running their internal affairs and a modicum of self-determination in the international arena in that they enjoyed direct membership to the League of Nations. However, in law, the dominions were effectively British provinces, extensions of the British Empire, and vulnerable to the whims of the throne in international affairs. “[Union Prime Minister] General Hertzog set out to the Imperial Conference of 1926, with the object of clearing up these anomalies.” (Rand Daily Mail, 30 May 1931).
At the 1926 Imperial Conference, General Hertzog was a “prime mover in securing the definition and codification of the new status by the Imperial Conference. ... [He] found himself in sympathy with the Irish and Canadian representatives.” (Rand Daily Mail, 30 May 1931).
Dominion delegates at the Imperial Conference in London. Front row: left to right: William Cosgrave, General Hertzog, Mackenzie King, Stanley Baldwin, Stanley Bruce, J G Coates and W S Monroe. At the Back are the Maharajah of Burdwan, Lord Frederick Edwin Smith of Birkenhead, Winston Churchill and Lord Arthur James Balfour. /Getty Images