After a narrow whites-only referendum, South Africa left the British Commonwealth and declared itself a republic, ending 51 years of dominion status. Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, chief engineer of apartheid, used the moment to consolidate Afrikaner nationalist power. The change had no effect on the country's brutal racial segregation, which continued for another three decades until the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s.
The declaration of a republic was less about democracy than about identity - specifically, the identity of South Africa's white Afrikaner minority, many of whom still resented British rule dating back to the Boer Wars. Hendrik Verwoerd, the prime minister often called the 'architect of apartheid,' had pushed a referendum in 1960 asking white voters only whether the country should become a republic. It passed by a slim margin of 52 percent.
On May 31, 1961, South Africa formally cut its last constitutional links to Queen Elizabeth II and installed a ceremonial state president in her place. The country withdrew from the Commonwealth days earlier after facing sharp criticism over apartheid policies from other member nations, particularly newly independent African and Asian states.
For South Africa's Black majority, disenfranchised and subject to increasingly severe segregation laws, the change in constitutional status meant nothing. Apartheid's machinery of forced removals, pass laws, and political repression rolled on unaffected. The republic would not become a genuine multiracial democracy until Nelson Mandela's election in 1994, more than three decades later.