The Prime Minister of South Africa (Afrikaans: Premier or Eerste Minister van Suid-Afrika) was the head of government in South Africa between 1910 and 1984, as the leader of the largest party in the House of Assembly.
The South African monarch was the head of state, until 1961, when the non-executive State President of South Africa assumed that role, following South Africa's departure from the Commonwealth of Nations, and the establishment of a republic.
The position of Prime Minister was abolished in 1984, when the State President was given executive powers after a new constitution was adopted. After 1994, the President's position was infused with many of the dependencies of the former Prime Minister's position.
In post-Apartheid South Africa, the Inkatha Freedom Party has called for a return to Westminster-style split executive with a Prime Minister, as part of its overarching goal of avoiding a single party South African state.
Read more about Prime Minister Of South Africa: List of Prime Ministers of South Africa (1910–1984)
Famous quotes containing the words south africa, prime minister, prime, minister, south and/or africa:
“I don’t have any doubts that there will be a place for progressive white people in this country in the future. I think the paranoia common among white people is very unfounded. I have always organized my life so that I could focus on political work. That’s all I want to do, and that’s all that makes me happy.”
—Hettie V., South African white anti-apartheid activist and feminist. As quoted in Lives of Courage, ch. 21, by Diana E. H. Russell (1989)
“Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life. What do you do after you are world-famous and nineteen or twenty and you have sat with prime ministers, kings and queens, the Pope? What do you do after that? Do you go back home and take a job? What do you do to keep your sanity? You come back to the real world.”
—Wilma Rudolph (1940–1994)
“If one had to worry about one’s actions in respect of other people’s ideas, one might as well be buried alive in an antheap or married to an ambitious violinist. Whether that man is the prime minister, modifying his opinions to catch votes, or a bourgeois in terror lest some harmless act should be misunderstood and outrage some petty convention, that man is an inferior man and I do not want to have anything to do with him any more than I want to eat canned salmon.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“[T]he dignity of parliament it seems can brook no opposition to it’s power. Strange that a set of men who have made sale of their virtue to the minister should yet talk of retaining dignity!”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“During Prohibition days, when South Carolina was actively advertising the iodine content of its vegetables, the Hell Hole brand of ‘liquid corn’ was notorious with its waggish slogan: ‘Not a Goiter in a Gallon.’”
—Administration in the State of Sout, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)