Malan, Daniel F

▪ South African politician

born May 22, 1874, near Riebeeck West, Cape Colony [now Cape of Good Hope, S.Af.]

died Feb. 7, 1959, Stellenbosch, S.Af.

      statesman and politician who is best remembered for forming the first exclusively Afrikaner (Boer) government of South Africa and for instituting 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 backed the National Party led by J.B.M. Hertzog.

      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 he succeeded in having Afrikaans recognized as an official language of the Union, replacing Dutch (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 Nationalist Party, which became the official opposition.

      Because Hertzog regarded World War II as no concern of South Africa, he fell from power and soon became reconciled with Malan, who also favoured neutrality. Together they formed the reunited National Party in 1939. When Hertzog withdrew from the party in December 1940, Malan assumed leadership. With patience and considerable skill, Malan welded together a reunited National Party that won 43 seats in the House of Assembly in the 1943 election. By appealing to Afrikaner racial sentiments, the Nationalists in alliance with the smaller Afrikaner Party won a narrow majority in the House of Assembly in the election of 1948. This enabled Malan to form the first exclusively Afrikaner government of South Africa.

      The primary concern of Malan's new government was to implement the policy of apartheid. The government's attempt to remove the Coloureds (people of mixed race) from the common voting rolls of Cape Province in 1951 was declared invalid by the Suprme Court in 1952, however, and the crisis was still unresolved when, after increasing his party's parliamentary majority in the 1953 general election, Malan retired in 1954. His successors implemented the apartheid policies begun in his administration.

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