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Paul Oliver Sauer ( 1 January 1898, Wynberg, Cape Town - 11 January 1976, Stellenbosch) was a South African Cabinet Minister and lifelong member of the National Party.
Sauer was born in Wynberg near Cape Town in 1898 as the third child of Jacobus Wilhelmus Sauer and Mary Constance Cloete; he also had two sisters. Sauer's middle name came from his aunt, Olive Schreiner [ citation needed ]. When Sauer was six years old, the family moved to his father's farm, Uitkyk, in the Stellenbosch district. Initially, Sauer attended school at a neighbouring farm. At the age of eleven, he went to SACS in Cape Town where he became head boy of Rosedale house and captain of the first rugby team . At the South African College, where he enrolled for the BA course in 1916, he argued in the debating association for South Africa to become a republic. Because of this debate and the large number of Afrikaans students at the time; he was elected to the Students' Council. After two years at SA College, and without completing the BA degree, Sauer, became the first enrolled student at the newly established Faculty of Agriculture at Victoria College, Stellenbosch. He obtained a diploma in agriculture with distinction. In 1921, he went to farm for his mother on the farm Uitkyk. In 1929, his mother sold the farm and he kept Kanonkop, which was part of Uitkyk, as his inheritance and continued to farm there. [1]
Meanwhile, in 1923 he waged his first election campaign as a candidate for the National Party in the Provincial Council election in Stellenbosch . He lost the election by just more than twenty votes. The next year he was a candidate again in Stellenbosch, this time for the House of Assembly, and he gained 65 more votes than in 1923, but lost by 470, because after the terror of 1923,[ clarification needed ] the South African Party registered hundreds of Coloured people as voters. Experiences such as those of Sauer in a marginal seat like Stellenbosch, where the Coloured vote prevailed against the NP, contributed to the party's later policy of removing Coloureds from the common voters roll.
In 1929, he stood in Victoria West as candidate of the NP against the later SAP Senator AM Conroy and defeated him by 88 votes. Four years later, he was asked by the NP from Humansdorp to run for office there in place of the recently deceased minister Charlie Malan. He did so and represented Humansdorp until 1966 as member of the House of Assembly. It stretched from the Van Stadens River to Plettenberg Bay and also the Kouga River and the Langkloof. He then became a senator, a position he held until 1970. This means that his parliamentary career spanned 41 years, as long as his father's. However, he remained as vice-chairman of the Cape NP until 1972, before finally leaving active politics.
Sauer would become a general in the Ossewabrandwag. [2]
In 1947 D.F. Malan, as leader of the Herenigde Nasionale Party, established the Sauer Commission, [3] chaired by Paul Sauer, [4] to formulate apartheid policies suitable for adoption by a Nationalist government. The Sauer Commission was in part intended to forestall the Native Laws Commission (Fagan Commission) on African urbanisation, appointed by Smuts in 1946 and chaired by Judge Henry Fagan. These rival reports shaped the respective platforms of the government and the opposition in the ensuing election. They provide a useful way into understanding the political alternatives entertained by the two leading white political parties of the day. The Fagan Commission accepted African urbanisation as a fact and recommended adapting the pass laws and migrant labour system to recognise the reality of racial interdependence in the economy (in 1948 the proportion of white employees employed in industry was 34 per cent and in decline). By contrast, the Sauer Commission looked to a more comprehensive solution to the native question along the lines of 'total segregation'. For this reason, the Sauer Commission has often been viewed as a blueprint for the apartheid system. [5] [6]
The members of the Sauer commission were: Paul Sauer, G.B.A. Gerdener, E.G. Jansen, J.J. Serfontein and M.D.C. De Wet Nel.
After the National Party 's surprising victory in 1948, Dr. D.F. Malan appointed Sauer as Minister of Railways. In 1954 he became Minister of Lands, Forestry and Water Affairs. It was through his work that the Paul Sauer Dam (now known as the Kouga Dam) was built for the sake of the farmers of the Kouga. Sauer served in the Cabinet of Hans Strydom as Minister of Public Works and Minister of Lands and Irrigation. In wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, Sauer along with Eben Dönges and Ben Schoeman called for a relaxation of certain Apartheid policies, which was subsequently rejected by Verwoerd.
Sauer inherited the famous Kanonkop Wine Estate from his father, and it is now owned by his grandchildren. Paul Sauer was an early spokesman and figurehead of the South African wine industry, and Kanonkop named one of their wines after him.
Through his mediation, the N2 national road from Cape Town was built. The Paul Sauer Bridge on the N2 and over the Storms River is a well-known landmark in the Tsitsikamma. He also did much to uplift the forester's standard of living and improve their working conditions. Because of his dedication and admiration for his constituents in the Humansdorp constituency, the residents of Kareedouw decided to name the local school after him and since 1963 the school is known as Paul Sauer High School.
Sauer retired from active politics in 1963 and died on 11 January 1976 of a lung disease and was buried in Stellenbosch.
The Province of the Cape of Good Hope, commonly referred to as the Cape Province and colloquially as The Cape, was a province in the Union of South Africa and subsequently the Republic of South Africa. It encompassed the old Cape Colony, as well as Walvis Bay, and had Cape Town as its capital. In 1994, the Cape Province was divided into the new Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Western Cape provinces, along with part of the North West.
PinotagePIN-ə-tahzh is a red wine grape that is South Africa's signature variety. It was cultivated there in 1925 as a cross between Pinot noir and Cinsaut. It typically produces deep red varietal wines with smoky, bramble and earthy flavours, sometimes with notes of bananas and tropical fruit, but has been criticised for sometimes smelling of acetone. The grape is a viticultural intraspecific cross of two varieties of Vitis vinifera, not an interspecific hybrid.
Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, also known as H. F. Verwoerd, was a Dutch-born South African politician, scholar, and newspaper editor who was Prime Minister of South Africa and is commonly regarded as the architect of apartheid and nicknamed the "father of apartheid". Verwoerd played a significant role in socially engineering apartheid, the country's system of institutionalized racial segregation and white supremacy, and implementing its policies, as Minister of Native Affairs (1950–1958) and then as prime minister (1958–1966). Furthermore, Verwoerd played a vital role in helping the far-right National Party come to power in 1948, serving as their political strategist and propagandist, becoming party leader upon his premiership. He was the Union of South Africa's last prime minister, from 1958 to 1961, when he proclaimed the founding of the Republic of South Africa, remaining its prime minister until his assassination in 1966.
The Ossewabrandwag (OB) was an Afrikaner nationalist organization with strong ties to national socialism, founded in South Africa in Bloemfontein on 4 February 1939. The organization was strongly opposed to South African participation in World War II, and vocally supportive of Nazi Germany. OB carried out a campaign of sabotage against state infrastructure, resulting in a government crackdown. The unpopularity of that crackdown has been proposed as a contributing factor to the victory of the National Party in the 1948 South African general election and the rise of apartheid.
The National Party, also known as the Nationalist Party, was a political party in South Africa from 1914 to 1997, which was responsible for the implementation of apartheid rule. The party was an Afrikaner ethnic nationalist party, which initially promoted the interests of Afrikaners but later became a stalwart promoter and enactor of white supremacy, for which it is best known. It first became the governing party of the country in 1924. It merged with its rival, the SAP, during the Great Depression, and a splinter faction became the official opposition during World War II and returned to power. With the National Party governing South Africa from 4 June 1948 until 9 May 1994, the country for the bulk of this time was only a de jure or partial democracy, as from 1958 onwards non-white people were barred from voting. In 1990, it began to style itself as simply a South African civic nationalist party, and after the fall of apartheid in 1994, attempted to become a moderate conservative one. The party's reputation was damaged irreparably by perpetrating apartheid, and it rebranded itself as the New National Party in 1997 before eventually dissolving in 2005.
Balthazar Johannes "B. J." Vorster was a South African apartheid politician who served as the prime minister of South Africa from 1966 to 1978 and the fourth state president of South Africa from 1978 to 1979. Known as B. J. Vorster during much of his career, he came to prefer the anglicized name John in the 1970s.
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Stellenbosch is a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa, situated about 50 kilometres east of Cape Town, along the banks of the Eerste River at the foot of the Stellenbosch Mountain. The town became known as the City of Oaks or Eikestad in Afrikaans and Dutch due to the large number of oak trees that were planted by its founder, Simon van der Stel, to grace the streets and homesteads.
Stellenbosch University (SU) (Afrikaans: Universiteit Stellenbosch, Xhosa: iYunivesithi yaseStellenbosch) is a public research university situated in Stellenbosch, a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Stellenbosch is the oldest university in South Africa and the oldest extant university in Sub-Saharan Africa, which received full university status in 1918. Stellenbosch University designed and manufactured Africa's first microsatellite, SUNSAT, launched in 1999.
The Sauer Commission, was created in 1948 largely in response to the Fagan Commission. It was appointed by the Herenigde Nasionale Party and favoured even stricter segregation laws.
Theophilus Ebenhaezer Dönges was a South African politician who was elected the state president of South Africa, but died before he could take office, aged 69.
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Afrikaner nationalism is a nationalistic political ideology created by Afrikaners residing in Southern Africa during the Victorian era. The ideology was developed in response to the significant events in Afrikaner history such as the Great Trek, the First and Second Boer Wars and the resulting anti-British sentiment that developed among Afrikaners and opposition to South Africa's entry into World War I.
Daniël Cornelis Boonzaier, more commonly known as D.C. Boonzaier, was a South African cartoonist. He was famous for his caricatures of Cape politicians and celebrities at the turn of the century, and later for his anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist cartoons for Die Burger. He fathered the artist Gregoire Boonzaier.
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Media related to Paul Olivier Sauer at Wikimedia Commons
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