query: When did South Africa become an independent country?
passage: History of South Africa
Following the defeat of the Boers in the Anglo-Boer or South African War (1899–1902), the Union of South Africa was created as a dominion of the British Empire in terms of the South Africa Act 1909, which amalgamated the four previously separate British colonies: Cape Colony, Natal Colony, Transvaal Colony, and Orange River Colony. The country became a self-governing nation state within the British Empire, in 1934 following enactment of the Status of the Union Act. The dominion came to an end on 31 May 1961 as the consequence of a 1960 referendum, which legitimised the country becoming a sovereign state named Republic of South Africa. A republican constitution was adopted.
passage: Netherlands–South Africa relations
In 1948, the South African government, at the time representing only a small proportion of the population, erected a system of strict racial segregation and called it apartheid (separateness) which is a codified system of racial stratification which first began to take form in South Africa under the Dutch Empire in the late eighteenth century. Initially, the Dutch government was neutral to the apartheid government in South Africa. South Africa was one of only a handful of United Nations member states to support the Dutch view that the issues the Netherlands faced concerning the decolonization of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea were of a 'domestic' nature and that the UN had no right to interfere. In 1949, during the visit of South African Prime Minister Daniel François Malan to the Netherlands, Dutch Queen Juliana told her guest that she would "never set foot in his country as long as apartheid reigned". In 1959 the Dutch representative to the UN abstained from voting for an anti-apartheid resolution, apartheid being regarded "an internal affair" of South Africa.