The Union of South Africa and the founding of the ANC
Britain's four southern African colonies unite as a white-ruled dominion, and Black leaders respond by founding the movement that will become the ANC.
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
- Native Life in South Africa — Sol T. Plaatje, P. S. King & Son (1916)
Eight years after the war, the Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange River colonies were united as the Union of South Africa on 31 May 1910, a self-governing British dominion under former Boer generals Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. Only the Cape kept a limited non-racial franchise; elsewhere Black, Coloured and Indian people could not vote, and none could sit in the Union Parliament. A delegation to London protested in vain.
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- A Concise History of South Africa — Robert Ross, Cambridge University Press (2008)
On 8 January 1912 African lawyers, teachers, chiefs and journalists met in Bloemfontein and founded the South African Native National Congress, renamed the African National Congress in 1923, with Sol Plaatje as its first secretary-general.
- A History of South Africa — Leonard Thompson and Lynn Berat, Yale University Press (2014)
- Native Life in South Africa — Sol T. Plaatje, P. S. King & Son (1916)
Why it matters today
The Union created the borders and the white-minority state that apartheid later hardened. The ANC, founded in response, is Africa's oldest liberation movement and governed South Africa from 1994.