James Barry Munnik Hertzog

James Barry Munnik Hertzog (1866-1942), prime minister of South Africa (1924-1939) and founder of the Nationalist Party. Born on a farm near Wellington of Boer (Afrikaner) parents, Hertzog practiced law in the Orange Free State early in the 1890s and was a judge on its high court from 1895 to 1899. During the Boer War (1899-1902) he fought the British as assistant chief commandant of the Orange Free State. After the war he served as attorney general and education minister in the new, British-dominated Orange River Colony. A zealous defender of Afrikaner rights, Hertzog secured the equality of Dutch and English as official languages when the Union of South Africa was established in 1910; he was South Africa's first minister of justice (1910-1912). In 1914 he founded the Nationalist Party to promote a “two-stream” society in which British and Afrikaners would be separate but equal. As prime minister he replaced Dutch with Afrikaans (the Boer dialect) as the country's second language and prepared the way for the later system of apartheid by promoting racial segregation. At the beginning of World War II (1939-1945) he tried to keep South Africa neutral, but Parliament declared war on Germany and Hertzog resigned. He was replaced as prime minister by the pro-British Jan Christiaan Smuts.