South Africa enters the Second World War

The law prohibited sexual relations outside marriage between Europeans and Africans. It inserted racial policing into private life and anticipated later apartheid classification laws.

The act enfranchised white women but not Black women. By enlarging the white electorate, it diluted the influence of the limited number of African men still qualified to vote in the Cape.

Hundreds of delegates from political, religious and professional bodies gathered to coordinate opposition to the Hertzog government's bills attacking African land and voting rights.

The act removed African voters in the Cape from the common voters' roll and substituted limited, segregated representation. It was a decisive attack on remaining African political rights.

The law formalized African reserve areas and created the South African Native Trust. Although it promised additional land, it entrenched territorial segregation and enabled further removals.

The document applied the Atlantic Charter's language of freedom to South Africa and demanded full citizenship, equal rights, land, education and social welfare for Africans.

A younger generation formed the Youth League to press the ANC toward mass action and African nationalism. Its founders included Anton Lembede, Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo.

Resisters occupied land in Durban to defy the Asiatic Land Tenure and Indian Representation Act, known as the Ghetto Act. More than 2,000 people were eventually imprisoned.

About 60,000 to 76,000 Black miners struck for higher wages and better conditions. Police and troops violently suppressed the week-long action, killing and injuring workers.

After India raised the treatment of people of Indian origin, the UN General Assembly declared that relations between the two countries should conform to international obligations and the UN Charter.