When the Reunited National Party won the general election in South Africa on 26 May 1948 it set into motion a series of events which would fundamentally reshape the social and economic configuration of the country. These changes included extending legislation favouring white employment, whitening urban areas through the mass relocation of black people to newly established ethnic homelands, separating educational facilities on the basis of race and making use of excessive violence to suppress political dissent. This was done through the promulgation of several laws which collectively became known by the platform on which the Reunited National Party had won the election – apartheid. Influential legislation included the Prohibition on Mixed Marriages Act, Population Registration Act, Group Areas Act, Bantu Education Act, Natives Resettlement Act and the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act.

To reimagine South Africa, nationalists needed an administrative and intellectual centre from which to implement changes to reshape South Africa into an apartheid future. The thesis of this dissertation is that they chose Pretoria and that it was systematically transformed into an apartheid citadel which served as the central node from where to make decisions. The city was chosen on the basis that it was already the most significant urban centre for Afrikaners, because it contained all the national offices of the public service, and, to a lesser extent, because it was the capital of the old Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek.

The focus of the dissertation is on the early apartheid period (1948-73), with specific reference to the start of the high apartheid period (1959-73) as being an important transition point where the apartheid citadel came into its own. A range of documentary evidence is used to engage with how the transformation of Pretoria took place and I argue that a crude ethnicised form of modernity, volksmoderniteit (meaning ‘people’s modernity’), as an underlying social process, has explanatory potential for understanding how South Africa shifted from segregation to apartheid, and Pretoria’s important place in this history.