THESEGREGATIONEM
in 1942, when he admitted that he could not stop Africans from flocking to
the towns and announced that "segregation has fallen on evil days."85
International events added to domestic pressures for reform. The propa-
ganda of the Allies during the war against Nazism, including the Atlantic
Charter, was antiracist. During 1942, the Japanese victories raised the
possibility of a Japanese invasion of South Africa and with it the need to
conciliate the black masses. And after the war ended, Smuts himself took
part in drafting the Charter of the United Nations, the Dutch and the
French failed to regain control of their eastern empires, and in 1947 the
British government withdrew from India.
In response to those domestic pressures and external developments, the
government appointed numerous committees and commissions, staffed by
reform-minded white people, to investigate the racial problems of the
country and to plan for the future. In their reports they criticized specific
hardships experienced by black South Africans but cast their recommenda-
tions within the established segregation framework. One report exposed
the appalling conditions in the reserves and denounced the system of mi-
grant labor as "morally, socially, and economically wrong" and looked