May 31st is one of those dates that just keeps showing up in South African history, and not always for comfortable reasons.
1910: On this day the Union of South Africa was officially proclaimed, bringing together the Cape Colony, Natal, the Transvaal and the Orange River Colony into one self-governing dominion under the British Crown. It was a massive political moment, the kind of thing that schoolbooks describe as nation-building, but it’s worth remembering who got left out of that “union.” Black South Africans, Coloured communities, Indians, they were deliberately excluded from meaningful political participation from day one. The ANC was founded just two years later, in 1912, which tells you everything about how that exclusion landed.
1961: Exactly 51 years after Union, South Africa became a republic on this same date, cutting its last formal ties with the British Commonwealth. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd had pushed hard for the republic, and the country voted in a whites-only referendum to make it happen. What strikes me is the symbolism of choosing May 31st deliberately, it was meant to feel like a continuation and a completion of Afrikaner nationalist ambitions going back to the Anglo-Boer War. For millions of South Africans it wasn’t a celebration though, it was just apartheid with a new flag.
1902: And going back even further, the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed on this date, ending the Anglo-Boer War after nearly three years of brutal conflict. The Boer republics surrendered their independence, and the British promised reconstruction and, eventually, self-government. What they didn’t promise, and what got quietly erased from the negotiations, was any real protection for Black South Africans. The “better future” that came out of Vereeniging was very much designed for white South Africans only, and the consequences of that shaped everything that followed for the next century.
Three events, 1902, 1910, and 1961, all on this one date, all connected by the same thread of who got to decide what South Africa was and who it was for. We’re living with those choices still.
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