Tag: Short

After the Anglo-Boer War from 1899 to 1902 and the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the British Union Flag became the national flag of South Africa. As was the case throughout the British Empire, the Red and Blue Ensign with the Union coat of arms were granted by British Admiralty warrants in 1910 for use at sea.

These ensigns were not intended to be used as the Union’s national flag, although they were used by some people as such, especially the Red Ensign. It was only after the first post-Union Afrikaner government took office in 1925 that a bill was introduced in Parliament to make provisions for a national flag for the Union; this action immediately prompted three years of near civil war, as the British thought that the Boers wanted to remove their cherished imperial symbols. Natal Province even threatened to secede from the Union.

Finally, a compromise was reached that resulted in the adoption of a separate flag for the Union in late 1927, and the design was first hoisted on 31 May 1928. The design was based on the so-called Van Riebeeck flag or Prinsevlag (“Prince’s flag” in Afrikaans) which was originally the Dutch flag, and consisted of orange, white, and blue horizontal stripes. A version of this flag was used as the flag of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape (with the VOC logo in the centre) from 1652 until 1795. The South African addition to the design was three smaller flags centred in the white stripe. The smaller flags were the Union Flag towards the hoist, the Orange Free State Vierkleur hanging vertically and the Transvaal Vierkleur towards the fly.

The choice of the Prinsevlag as the basis upon which to design the South African flag had more to do with compromise than Afrikaner political desires, as the Prinsevlag was believed to be the first flag hoisted on South African soil and was politically neutral as it was no longer the national flag of any nation. A further element of this compromise was that the Union Flag would continue to fly alongside the new South African national flag over official buildings. This state of duality continued until 1957 when the Union Flag lost its official status as per an Act of Parliament; the Red Ensign had lost its status as South Africa’s merchant flag in 1951.

Following a referendum, the country became a republic on 31 May 1961, but the design of the flag remained unchanged. However, there was intense pressure to change the flag, particularly from Afrikaners who resented the fact that the Union Flag was a part of the flag.

The former Prime Minister and architect of apartheid, Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, had a dream to hoist a “clean” flag over South Africa in the 1960s. The proposed design comprised three vertical stripes of the same colour of the Prinsevlag with a leaping Springbok Antelope over a wreath of six proteas in the centre. H.C. Blatt, then assistant secretary in the Department of the Prime Minister, designed the flag. Verwoerd’s successor, John Vorster, raised the flag issue at a news conference on 30 March 1971 and said that in light of the impending 10th anniversary Republic Day celebrations, he preferred to “keep the affair in the background”. This he said was done because he did not want the flag question to degenerate into a political football, as happened in the 1920s over the Union Flag, and that the matter would be considered again when circumstances would be “more normal”. He also went on to say that “I only want to warn, and express hope, that no person should drag politics in any form into this matter, because the flag must, at all times, be raised above party politics in South Africa”.

Despite the flag’s origins predating the National Party’s ascension to power, the presence of the three little flags in the middle was internationally perceived as being an implied endorsement of apartheid. In this light it is possible to theorise that the end of apartheid may not have beckoned a change in national flag if a more neutral one had indeed been selected in the 1960s, or perhaps even if the three subflags had been merely excised before the Prinsevlag became the inadvertent symbol of apartheid it did.