The voice of the ‘people’? Memoranda presented in 1947 to the Sauer commission by ‘knowledgeable’ Afrikaners

In March 1948 a rguab ly one of the mos t significant commiss ion r epor t s in the h i s to ry of South Africa appea red in final form. This was the Repor t of the colour quest ion commiss ion of the Re-united Nat ional Party, ~ commonly known as the Sauer commission, af ter its cha i rman, Paul Sauer, Member of Par l iament for H u m a n s d o r p and la ter cabinet minis ter . The Saner r epor t which outl ined the apar the id policy, should be seen as the culminat ion of uncoord ina ted Afrikaner efforts since the mid-1930s to formulate an a l ternat ive race policy to segregat ion which was widely regarded as ineffective. The foundat ions for the final formula t ion were laid in ter alia by ideas emana t ing f rom the Afrikaner Union for Racial Studies, 2 theor ies expounded by anthropologis ts , the r ecommenda t ions of a commiss ion appointed by the Cape Re-united National Par ty to inves t igate a future policy towards the coloured people, pol icy s t a t emen t s by poli t icians such as D F Malan and M D C de Wet Nel, and decisions taken in 1944 at the People ' s congress regarding the racial policies of the Afrikaner. 3 Although there is a considerable body of l i te ra ture on the dep loyment of apar the id af ter 1950, the crop is less abundan t on the fo rmat ion of the policy in the late 1940s. Revisionist h i s tor ians have quite r ightly cha l l enged Afr ikaner and l ibera l h i s t o r i o g r a p h y wh ich exp la ins the e m e r g e n c e of a p a r t h e i d m e r e l y in t e r m s of ideo logy and race . The e m p h a s i s has sh i f ted to the e f fec t s of s eg rega t ion and a p a r t h e i d on cap i t a l i s t d e v e l o p m e n t , p a r t i c u l a r l y w i th r e g a r d to the Afr ican