# Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949)

URL: https://allhistories.com/south-africa/timeline/1949-prohibition-of-mixed-marriages-act
Location: Cape Town, South Africa
Themes: main-event

The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, passed by Malan's government in 1949, made it a criminal offence for a white person to marry anyone classified as non-white, and it declared such marriages already contracted elsewhere invalid in South Africa. It extended earlier colonial and Union-era restrictions on interracial sex and marriage, and it was the first of the new government's statutes designed to enforce what Nationalists called racial purity. The measure was soon reinforced by the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950, which criminalised extramarital sex across the colour line, and by the Population Registration Act that made racial classification official. Police raids on bedrooms, forced separations and prosecutions followed, and families of mixed ancestry were broken or driven into hiding. Opposition came from churches and liberal critics, but little changed until the laws were repealed in 1985. At the date of this event the principal authority over the largest part of present-day South Africa, by the convention of this dataset, lay with Gideon Brand van Zyl, Governor-General of the Union of South Africa (1946–1951). The executive government of the Union was headed by Prime Minister D.F. Malan. These laws showed that apartheid intruded on the most private choices and relied on bureaucratic definitions of race. Their later repeal, a year before the pass laws fell, signalled the regime's growing inability to defend its own logic. Mixed-race couples and children were among the hardest hit, and the Act's repeal in 1985 was an early sign of reform pressures within the government.

## Why it matters
Banning interracial marriage turned intimate personal life into a matter of state control and became a symbol of apartheid's moral cost.

Ruler at the Time: [Gideon Brand van Zyl](https://allhistories.com/south-africa/rulers/gideon-brand-van-zyl)

Prime Minister of South Africa: D.F. Malan

## Sources
- [Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, 1949](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_of_Mixed_Marriages_Act,_1949)
- [apartheid](https://www.britannica.com/topic/apartheid)
- [www.sahistory.org.za](https://www.sahistory.org.za/)