Public Life
In 1923 he was elected to the House of Assembly as Member of Parliament for Ladybrand until he was defeated in 1938. He became leader of the National Party in the Orange Free State and MP for Winburg in 1939. As a staunch republican, he was a member of the National Party for many years. During the war he was well known as for being a fascist sympathiser. After the war he was appointed Minister of Justice when the National Party came to power in 1948, and was responsible for legislation to strengthen the powers of the South African Police to suppress anti-apartheid activity.Several figures in the Congress of Democrats were imprisoned for exposing his earlier links with fascism. From 1949–1950 he held the portfolio for Education, Arts and Science and became acting Prime Minister in 1958.
Swart was appointed Governor-General in 1960. Like his predecessor, Dr Jansen, he declined to take the oath of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II or to wear the ceremonial uniform. In a referendum later that year, a small majority of White voters endorsed a government proposal to establish a republic. In 1961, after signing the new republican constitution passed by Parliament, he asked the Queen to release him from office, and Parliament then elected him as State President, the new post which replaced the monarch and the governor-general as ceremonial head of state. Nelson Mandela and other underground black resistance leaders tried to protest against the change of government to the new republican, Afrikaner-dominated system by planning a three-day general strike of non-white workers, but the government preemptively averted most of these plans through an extensive use of police force to persecute the dissenters.
Although elected for a seven-year term office, Swart served as State President for only six years, and retired in 1967. He died in 1982. Swart was popularly known as "Blackie" (Swart is Afrikaans for "black").
Read more about this topic: Charles Robberts Swart
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