1961 — South Africa Leaves the Crown

On May 31, 1961, exactly fifty-one years after the Union of South Africa was created, the country became a republic. It cut its last ties to the British Crown and left the Commonwealth, a shift its leaders chose with care for its symbolism, marking the triumph of the apartheid vision its architects had imagined for decades.

A referendum the previous year had been close, decided by white voters alone. In Cape Town and Durban, thousands of Black South Africans, excluded from the vote, protested a republic built on their exclusion. The new state celebrated its independence from the Crown while denying independence, in any real sense, to most of its people.