created a state corporation for the manufacture of steel. It protected white
industrial workers from black competition and enfranchised white (but
not black) women, thereby reducing the black proportion of the voters in
the Cape Province from 20 to 10 percent. By promoting bilingualism, it
opened up the civil service to Afrikaners.
The government also fulfilled a major Afrikaner cultural goal. As we
have seen, the South Africa Act made English and Dutch the official lan-
guages of the country, although Afrikaans, the spoken language of Af-
rikaners, had deviated considerably from its Dutch roots. By 1925, how-
ever,the Bible had been translated into Afrikaans, there was an Afrikaans
dictionary, and there was a substantial literature in Afrikaans. In that year
a constitutional amendment replaced Dutch with Afrikaans as an official
Ianguage.P The opposition did not dispute th~t change, but differences
over the design of a national flag caused a prolonged and bitter ethnic
conflict. Parliament eventually created a hybrid flag that incorporated the
Union Jack and the flags of the Afrikaner republics.l?
In 1926, largely at Hertzog's instigation, an imperial conference at-
tended by the prime ministers of Great Britain and the self-governing