Why go
The Union’s formation explains why a single national government emerged from separate colonies and former Boer republics. Its 1913 land law is crucial context for later apartheid, while wartime politics show that unity among white South Africans was itself contested.
The full story
The Cape, Natal, Transvaal and Orange River colonies were joined in the Union of South Africa in 1910. It was a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, formed after negotiations that centred white political interests. Black South Africans were largely excluded from national power. The 1913 Natives Land Act sharply restricted where Black people could own or occupy land, building a legal foundation for later segregation and apartheid. The Union joined Britain and the Allies in the First World War, but some anti-British Boers rebelled in 1914. Political divisions over Britain continued into the interwar years and the Second World War. Those conflicts sit beside the more lasting domestic story of land and rights. When a museum presents the Union as a constitutional milestone, ask whose citizenship and land claims the new state recognised, and whose it denied.