Union of South Africa

UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA. - I. GEOGRAPHY. - A Dominion (since 1910) forming part of the British Commonwealth and consisting of a federation of four units (provinces), of very different territorial extent and demographic importance, as appears from the following table.

The territory of the U. S. corresponds to the southernmost extremity of the African continent and is bounded on the N. by the courses of the Orange, the Molopo, the Tlapin, the Marico, the Limpopo and by the Lebombo heights. It consists, in substance, of a plateau that rises in steps from a narrow coastal strip, interrupted by rocky promontories, the most conspicuous of which, that of Table Mountain (Table Mt., 1082 m.), which overlooks Cape Town, ends at the Cape of Good Hope.

The plateau rises, along its southern margin, in the Drakenbergen (Mountains of the Dragons), which locally (Orange) take on an alpine appearance (M. aux Sources, 3280 m.) and constitute the most important hydrographic node of the country. The climate, owing to the altitude (1000-1300 m. on the plateau), is mild and healthy, but the rains, copious along the south-eastern fringe, diminish toward the W., and much more rapidly and decidedly toward the interior. One passes thus, by degrees, from the coastal strip (subtropical in character, and cultivated with cotton, maize, sugar cane, rice, tea, bananas, in the E.; of Mediterranean type, with wheat and above all with tree crops, in the S. and the W.), to the steppes of the plateau, with a purely pastoral vocation, with small agricultural oases, and forests corresponding to the high, humid mountains of the provinces of the Transvaal and of the Orange and finally to the semi-desert tracts of the N., on the edge of the Kalahari (on the right bank of the middle and lower Orange River).

The province (formerly Colony) of the Cape was, until a short time ago, the most important region of southern Africa. The climate there permits an agriculture similar to that of Italy, and the open-range rearing of sheep flourishes there. In the middle basin of the Orange open the rich diamond fields centered on Kimberley, while, in addition to those of East London and Port Elizabeth, the province has the magnificent Port of Cape Town, bridgehead of the trans-African railway and the country's greatest exporting emporium. The province (formerly Colony) of Natal is a region of mountains, but along the coasts it lends itself well to various tropical crops. The Transvaal and the Orange, formerly independent Boer Republics, and then British colonies, are both pastoral territories; but for over a century the Transvaal has become the world's most important producer of gold and recently also an industrial country, given the great wealth of its subsoil, which the last decades have brought into ever greater prominence.

In the Union as a whole, more than agriculture (cereals, in the first place maize; fruit trees, vines, tea, sugar cane, etc.), economically notable is livestock rearing (32 million head of cattle, 6 of goats, 12 of sheep), which yields meat (including frozen), hides and dairy products and above all wool, of which the U. S. is today one of the world's great suppliers. But the foundations of its fortune the Union finds in the immense mineral resources at its disposal: gold and diamonds (1st place in the world), coal (the continent's largest deposits), iron, manganese, chromite, tin, copper, asbestos, etc.

This variety and wealth of raw materials has permitted the development of a flourishing industry, which the two recent world wars have powerfully stimulated and which has so far found its limit only in the scant purchasing power of the domestic market and in the great distances that, by contrast, separate the Union from the world's greatest consumer markets.

The population (12.4 million inhabitants in 1950) is made up for 3/4 of Bantu negroes, for 1/5 of whites (1.3 million, of English origin; 1 million Boers, descendants of the Dutch colonists established there toward the end of the 17th century), and the rest of mixed-bloods (coloured) and Asians (for the most part Indians). Notable is the number of urban centers, half a dozen of which exceed 100 thousand inhabitants (in addition to those mentioned thus far, Port Elizabeth, Springfontain and Germiston). The seat of Parliament is at Cape Town, that of the government at Pretoria; but the center of economic life is at Johannesburg (760 thousand inhabitants), in the Transvaal. Durban (340 thousand inhabitants), in Natal, is one of the most frequented ports.

In the Dominion the executive power belongs to the Governor-General; the legislative to an elective bicameral Parliament. Besides English, Afrikaans is considered an official language.

Giuseppe Caraci

II. HISTORY

On the vicissitudes of the native populations and of the lands of the present-day U. S. before the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope there is no information whatsoever, although the habitability of those regions, even in prehistoric times, is supported by the discovery, in past decades, of human skulls and bones.

Europeans learned of the Cape of Good Hope after the voyage of the Portuguese Bartolomeu Dias who, in the attempt to reach the Indies, on the return journey, in the first months of 1488, had the good fortune to discover it. The Cape was then rounded in 1497 by Vasco da Gama, who on Christmas Day of that same year sighted Natal, so named by him precisely in memory of the Christmas feast. The Portuguese, however, never settled in southern Africa and indeed avoided landing in the Cape region because of the hostility of the Hottentots, who in 1510 had killed Francisco de Almeida, first viceroy of the Portuguese Indies, who had come ashore in Table Bay. When the ruling house of Portugal died out and that kingdom was united to the Spanish crown, Philip II, in conflict with the rebellious Netherlands, forbade Dutch ships to call at Lisbon during their voyages to the Indies. This measure, enacted with the intention of striking at the commercial and maritime activity of the United Provinces, led in 1652 to the occupation, by the Dutch East India Company, of the Cape of Good Hope, where a supply station was established for ships traveling to the islands of the Sunda. Although the Company was opposed to the immigration of Europeans and to an extension of the territorial occupation, the very character of the Cape as a supply port later favored the arrival of colonizers (Dutch, Germans, French Huguenots) who promoted the cultivation of agricultural products and the raising of livestock.

The newcomers, little by little, extended the area of occupation ever more; in search of pastures they moved eastward, came into contact with the Bushmen who were forced to abandon their lands, and favored the importation of black and Malay slaves. Thus toward the end of the 18th century the supply station had expanded considerably and had given rise to a European colony of about 30,000 inhabitants. During the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, England, after the occupation of Holland by France, seized the Cape in 1795 and held it until 1803. After the region was restored, following the Treaty of Amiens (1802), to the Batavian Republic, a satellite state of France (the Dutch East India Company having meanwhile failed), the rekindling of the Franco-British armed conflict determined in 1806 once again the English to occupy the Cape, over which they proclaimed their sovereignty following the Treaty of 13 Aug. 1814 with the King of the Netherlands. The policy pursued in the colony by England greatly embittered the Dutch colonists, who on the one hand had to submit to the proclamation of English as the sole official language, and on the other were sensibly harmed in their interests by the support granted by the new rulers to the indigenous populations.

The Boers (this being the name of the Dutch-speaking colonists) therefore decided to seek a new homeland, where they could live independently and according to their own laws. This was the reason for the so-called Great Trek, the emigration from the Cape Colony, between 1836 and 1846, of about ten thousand people. They proceeded eastward, into Natal, and toward the north, in the direction of the Orange and Vaal rivers. The English, however, did not tolerate the formation of a free Boer republic in Natal, which they occupied militarily in 1842 and annexed two years later to the Cape Colony. The majority of the Boers therefore undertook a new march of relocation into the lands beyond the Vaal. In 1848 the governor of the Cape Colony, Harry Smith, had extended English sovereignty also over the region between the Orange and the Vaal, but on 23 February 1854, with the Treaty of Bloemfontein, the English renounced it and recognized the independence of the Boers. In the same year the Orange Free State was proclaimed. Two years earlier (Treaty of Sandrivier, 17 January 1852) the English had also recognized the independence of the Boers residing beyond the Vaal. Once the attempts (which were about to provoke an armed struggle between the Boers north and south of the Vaal) to constitute a single Boer State had proved vain, the Transvaal colonists gave life in 1858 to the South African Republic (Transvaal). The discovery of diamond and gold deposits in the two Republics after 1870 renewed English interest in those regions. Finally the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 was reached, conducted with extreme determination by the Empire. After a heroic and unequal struggle under the leadership of the two presidents Krüger and Steyn, the two Republics had to conclude the Peace of Vereeniging (31 May 1902) and recognized British sovereignty in exchange for the promise that their own traditions would be respected (equal status of the Dutch language with English) and for the recognition of self-government, which happened in 1906 in the Transvaal and in 1907 in the Orange Free State. Subsequently the four colonies (Natal too, since 1893, enjoyed a self-governing status) began to examine the possibility of a closer union among themselves. Many were the obstacles to be overcome. Particularly hard was that of whether or not to grant the right to vote to non-Europeans, who in the Cape Colony, on the other hand, had enjoyed it since 1853. That obstacle was overcome by recognizing the status quo (the vote also for non-Europeans in the Cape, but not in the former republics) and by inserting an article in the new unionist Constitution that prohibited any amendment in that matter, except in the case that it were not approved by a two-thirds majority of the two Chambers of the South African Parliament meeting in joint session. The new Constitution, the South Africa Act approved by the English Parliament and promulgated on 20 September 1909, entered into force on 31 May 1910, bringing into being the U. S. with its own government and parliament. Executive power was in the hands of a governor general, representative of the Crown, who appointed the ministers, who had to be members of Parliament.

The first Premier of the Union was General Botha. At the outbreak of the First World War the U. S., despite the strong opposition of part of the Boers, declared war on Germany and its armed forces proceeded to occupy German South-West Africa and took part in the operations in German East Africa. When Botha died in 1919, General Smuts succeeded him as prime minister, being very favorable to England. Opposed by the nationalists, he had to yield power, following the elections of 1924 in which his South African party did not have the majority, to General Hertzog, who instead followed a policy tending to affirm fully the equal rights of the Afrikaners (South Africans of Afrikaans language, that is, Cape Dutch).

Having formed a coalition in 1933 with Smuts's party, Hertzog continued to preside over the government until 4 September 1939, when his proposal to maintain the Union's neutrality in the Second World War did not receive Parliament's approval. The new cabinet presided over by Smuts declared war on the Axis powers and decisively supported the war effort of the British Empire. In the elections of 6 May 1948 the majority of the electorate gave its votes to the nationalist coalition of D. F. Malan, whose government is characterized by a clear racist stance in favor of the Europeans of the U. S., with the aim both of safeguarding the purity of the white race and of preventing the colored populations from being able to achieve an effective political weight.

BBL.: S. Mendelssohn, South African bibliogr., London 1910; H. Conover, The Union of South Africa, A selected list of references, Washington 1943; M. S. Geen, The making of the Union of South Africa, London 1946; M. Roberts-A. E. G. Trollip, The South African Opposition 1939-45, ibid. 1947; H. J. May, The South African Constitution, 3rd ed., Cape Town 1949; O. Hintrager, Geschichte von Südafrika, Munich 1952; L. Marquard, The peoples and policies of South Africa, London 1952; E. P. Dvorin, Racial separation in South Africa, An analysis of Apartheid theory, Chicago 1952.

Silvio Furlani

III. EVANGELIZATION

Under the rule of the Calvinist Boers, who settled at the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th and 18th centuries, every Catholic ministry and any Catholic missionary activity were impossible. The decree of toleration of 1804 allowed the first Catholic priests to enter, but they were expelled in 1806 by the English. From 1820 Irish priests succeeded in building a small church in Cape Town, which was part of the apostolic vicariate of the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Madagascar and Australia, erected in 1818-1819. But only with the erection of a separate apostolic vicariate, named after the Cape of Good Hope, in 1837 and under the first bishop Raymond Griffith, O.P., was it possible to organize the ministry of souls. In 1847 the apostolic vicariate of the Cape of Good Hope was divided into the apostolic vicariate of the Cape of Good Hope, western district, and of the Cape of Good Hope, eastern district. In 1850 the apostolic vicariate of Natal was erected. Here the Oblates of Mary Immaculate began the mission among the blacks, first among the Zulu and then, given the difficulties encountered, among the Basuto of Basutoland. In the Orange Free State the first Catholic priest, the Premonstratensian Hoenderwanger, was able to settle in Bloemfontein. His successors, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, extended the activity to the Transvaal. Here the first task was the ministry among the numerous emigrants attracted to southern Africa by the diamond discoveries at Kimberley and the gold mines at Witwatersrand. In 1886 two new ecclesiastical districts were erected: the apostolic vicariate of the Orange Free State, also including Griqualand and Basutoland, and the apostolic prefecture of Transvaal, both entrusted to the Oblates. In the meantime the missionary Seminary of Lyon had begun the mission among the negroes of the north of the Cape Colony in the apostolic prefecture of Cape of Good Hope, central district, erected in 1874; then in 1882 the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales took over, and in 1885 the territory was detached from the aforesaid prefecture as the apostolic prefecture of the Orange River. A more intense activity among the negroes was carried on by the Trappists, who arrived in 1880 in the eastern district of the Cape of Good Hope and in 1882 in Natal, and from their abbey of Mariannhill founded flourishing mission stations. In 1910, the time of the founding of the U. S. comprising the Cape Colony, Natal and the Boer States subdued by the English after the Boer War of 1899-1902, the Orange Free State and Transvaal, there existed in the territory of the U. the apostolic vicariates of Cape of Good Hope (western district), Cape of Good Hope (eastern district), Natal, Kimberley, Transvaal, Orange River and the apostolic prefecture of Cape of Good Hope (central district). In the Transvaal the Benedictines of the Cassinese Congregation took over the apostolic prefecture of Northern Transvaal, erected in that same year 1910.

After the First World War German missionaries too went in greater numbers to southern Africa: the Benedictines of St. Ottilien to Zululand in 1921; the Pallottines to the Cape of Good Hope (central district) in 1922, and to Queenstown in 1929; the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit to Kroonstad, Orange Free State; the Priests of the Sacred Heart to Gariep, Eastern Cape; the Missionaries Sons of the Sacred Heart to Lydenburg, eastern Transvaal in 1923.

In 1921 Mariannhill had become a separate apostolic vicariate, divided in 1930 into Mariannhill and Umtata; in 1935 the apostolic prefecture of Mount Currie was detached from Mariannhill and entrusted to the Franciscans of the province of Bavaria. With these erections the missionary work, until then for the most part restricted to European Catholics, extended to the natives. Important progress was recorded, hindered however by the contrasts and struggles between the races. In 1922 the apostolic delegation was instituted.

In the years after the Second World War there were new divisions, and the erection of the apostolic vicariates of Bethlehem and Pretoria in 1948. On Jan. 11, 1951, in the U. S. including Basutoland and Swaziland, the ecclesiastical hierarchy was erected with 4 archdioceses and 17 dioceses: archdiocese of CAPETOWN, erected an apostolic vicariate in 1818, in 1837 took the name of Cape of Good Hope, from 1847 that of Cape of Good Hope, eastern district, entrusted to the secular clergy. Diocese of ALIWAL, erected an apostolic prefecture of Gariep in 1932, vicariate of Aliwal in 1936, entrusted to the Priests of the Sacred Heart. Diocese of QUEENSTOWN, erected a mission in 1929, apostolic prefecture in 1938, apostolic vicariate in 1948, entrusted to the Pallottines. Diocese of OUDTSHOORN, erected an apostolic prefecture of Cape of Good Hope, central district, in 1874, vicariate of Oudtshoorn in 1948, entrusted to the Pallottines. Diocese of PORT ELIZABETH, erected an apostolic vicariate of Cape of Good Hope, eastern district, in 1847, took the name of Port Elizabeth in 1939; entrusted to the secular clergy. Archdiocese of DURBAN, erected an apostolic vicariate of Natal in 1850, entrusted to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Diocese of MARIANNHILL, erected an apostolic vicariate in 1921, entrusted to the Congregation of Mariannhill. Diocese of ESHOVE, erected an apostolic prefecture of Zululand in 1922, apostolic vicariate of Eshove in 1923, entrusted to the Benedictines of St. Ottilien. Diocese of KOKSTAD, erected an apostolic prefecture of Mount Currie in 1936, apostolic vicariate of Kokstad in 1939, entrusted to the Franciscans. Diocese of UMTATA, erected an apostolic prefecture in 1930, apostolic vicariate in 1937, entrusted to the Congregation of Mariannhill. Archdiocese of PRETORIA, erected an apostolic vicariate in 1948, entrusted to the secular clergy. Diocese of JOHANNESBURG, erected an apostolic prefecture of Transvaal in 1886, apostolic vicariate in 1904, took its present name in 1948, entrusted to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Diocese of LYDENBURG, apostolic prefecture in 1923, apostolic vicariate in 1948, entrusted to the Missionaries Sons of the Sacred Heart. Diocese of BREMERSDORF, erected an apostolic prefecture of Swaziland in 1923, apostolic vicariate in 1939, entrusted to the Servites. Abbey "nullius" of PIETERSBURG, erected an apostolic prefecture of Northern Transvaal in 1910, abbey "nullius" of Pietersburg in 1939, entrusted to the Benedictines. Archdiocese of BLOEMFONTEIN, erected in 1951, entrusted to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Diocese of BETHLEHEM, erected an apostolic vicariate in 1948, entrusted to the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. Diocese of KEIMOSS, erected an apostolic prefecture of Orange River in 1885, apostolic vicariate in 1898, took its present name in 1940, entrusted to the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales. Diocese of KIMBERLEY, erected an apostolic vicariate of the Orange Free State in 1886, took its present name in 1918, entrusted to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Diocese of KROONSTADT, erected an apostolic prefecture in 1923, apostolic vicariate in 1935, entrusted to the Dominicans. Diocese of MASERU, erected an apostolic prefecture of Basutoland in 1894, apostolic vicariate in 1909, entrusted to the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Diocese of LERIBE, erected in 1952, entrusted to the native clergy. - See plate LXXXI.

Giovanni Rommerskirchen