Tested loyalties: Police and politics in South Africa, 1939-63

Abstract

Well into their rule, at a time when South Africa was increasingly perceived as a police state, the Nationalists, the party of apartheid, depended for the implementation of their policies on structures and personnel inherited from previous governments. Even in the South African Police, the institution most associated with the country's authoritarian reputation, key developments of the early apartheid decades originated in and cannot properly be understood without reference to the preceding period. A legacy of conflict between pro-and anti-war white policemen after 1939 was particularly significant. Concentrating on the careers and views of illustrative officers, notably members of the Special Branch, rather than on the police in abstraction, this article analyses the complexities and continuities in the South African state's handling of domestic dissent in the years before and after the apartheid election of 1948. © 2012 Cambridge University Press.