Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: Establishing the Territory
- 2 Immigration, Nations and National Identity
- 3 ‘A White Man's Land’: Indian Immigration and the 1913 Immigrants Regulation Act
- 4 Not White Like Us: Preserving the ‘Original Stocks’ and the Exclusion of Jewish Immigrants
- 5 Building an Unhyphenated Nation: British Immigration and Afrikaner Nationalism
- 6 One (White) Nation, One Fatherland: Republicanism, Assisted Immigration and the Metaphysical Body
- 7 Democratic South Africa: Inclusive Identities and Exclusive Immigration Policies
- 8 Conclusion: Nationalisms, National Identities and South Africa's Immigration Policies
- Notes to Chapters
- Appendix 1 Total, immigration and emigration, and net gain/loss in migration, by sex, 1924–2004
- Appendix 2 Immigration by country of previous permanent residence, birth and citizenship, 1924–2004
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘A White Man's Land’: Indian Immigration and the 1913 Immigrants Regulation Act
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 October 2019
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: Establishing the Territory
- 2 Immigration, Nations and National Identity
- 3 ‘A White Man's Land’: Indian Immigration and the 1913 Immigrants Regulation Act
- 4 Not White Like Us: Preserving the ‘Original Stocks’ and the Exclusion of Jewish Immigrants
- 5 Building an Unhyphenated Nation: British Immigration and Afrikaner Nationalism
- 6 One (White) Nation, One Fatherland: Republicanism, Assisted Immigration and the Metaphysical Body
- 7 Democratic South Africa: Inclusive Identities and Exclusive Immigration Policies
- 8 Conclusion: Nationalisms, National Identities and South Africa's Immigration Policies
- Notes to Chapters
- Appendix 1 Total, immigration and emigration, and net gain/loss in migration, by sex, 1924–2004
- Appendix 2 Immigration by country of previous permanent residence, birth and citizenship, 1924–2004
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
He admitted that if the question were not complicated he would like to call a spade a spade and say clearly and exactly those they wanted to keep out, but they recognised their imperial obligations, and that they were part of the British Empire, and they should do all in their power to avoid embarrassing the Central Government … but they wanted to be masters in their own house, and they wanted to be in a position to say whom they did not want in the country … they all knew it was the intention of South Africa to exclude Asiatics … it was a matter of the self-preservation of the white man in South Africa …. Therefore, they would avoid naming any race by name, and excluding them on that account, but they must make it clear that they deemed the European civilisation the desirable one from which to see progress and advancement of the country.
J.C. Smuts, Minister of the Interior, House of Assembly, 30/4/1913The Union of South Africa was created in 1910 as a dominion state of the British Empire out of the colonies of the Transvaal, the Cape, Natal and the Orange River. The new government faced the task of trying to build a nation out of a white population racked with tension and conflict. Less than ten years earlier, sections of its population had been involved in the long and bloody Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902). During the war, over 20 000 Afrikaner women and children alone died of disease and malnutrition in British concentration camps. Tens of thousands of others, including over 100 000 black Africans, were incarcerated in concentration and refugee camps. The defeat of the Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in 1902 eventually led to the realisation of the British imperial vision of a federated Union of South Africa in 1910. But the bitter legacy of the war was harder to erase. Discussions of the ‘racial question’ at the time of Union referred to contestations and friction between Afrikaners and English speakers. Dan O'Meara has argued that greater attention should be paid to the origins of the modern South African state in the contestations between the British and Afrikaner in the Anglo-Boer War.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Selecting ImmigrantsNational Identity and South Africa's Immigration Policies 1910-2008, pp. 31 - 56Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2009