ABSTRACT
The National Party (NP) assumed power in 1948 without a substantive or detailed programme. 'Apartheid' had proven to be a magnetic electoral concept, but it was not until 1952 that the Native Laws Amendment Act, which introduced the policy and framework of the labour bureaux system, signalled that the NP government had seriously begun to reorganize the state's apparatuses. A striking feature of state restructuring in the 1950s was the rapid emergence of the Native Affairs Department (NAD) from the obscure status which had characterised it virtually since 1910. By the mid-1950s there was little doubt that the emerging state form, and the new pass system in particular, owed much to the new-found dynamism emanating from the NAD. Personnel changes had much to do with this development. The senior civil servants employed in Native Affairs (NA) in the 1940s - men such as D L Smit and W G Mears - were hard-working officials and well-respected within liberal circles (Bell 1980). In the immediate postwar years, however, administration had crumbled as the high rates of black urbanization had seriously undone the labour allocation system of the segregation era. With the report of the Native Laws Commission still pending, no policy initiatives emerged; instead, pleas from harassed officials in the increasingly turbulent black residential areas were routinely put on ice pending the Commission's report.
