D. F. Malan in the context of "1948 South African general election"

The 1949 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference was the fourth meeting of the Heads of government of the Commonwealth of Nations. It was held in the United Kingdom in April 1949 and was hosted by that country's prime minister, Clement Attlee.

The principal topic of the conference was the relationship of India, which was intending to become a republic, to the Commonwealth, which, hitherto, had been an association of Britain and British dominions united by sharing a constitutional link by sharing the British sovereign as their head of state, in particular whether a Commonwealth state could become a republic and remain in the Commonwealth, if so, whether it had the same status in the Commonwealth as the dominions who had the British sovereign as their head of state. The Canadian government feared that if India was not permitted to remain in the Commonwealth as an autonomous republic then Pakistan, Ceylon, and South Africa would soon leave as well, resulting in the Commonwealth's collapse. Australian prime minister Ben Chifley was on one pole during the conference, arguing for maintaining a strong British connection, while South Africa's newly elected nationalist prime minister, D. F. Malan, was on the other pole arguing for complete independence.

The Herenigde Nasionale Party (English: Reunited National Party; HNP) was an Afrikaner nationalist and conservative political party in South Africa. It was founded in 1940 from the merger of the Purified National Party (Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party, GNP) led by future prime minister D. F. Malan and a faction of the United Party (UP) led by J. B. M. Hertzog, who split from the party and resigned as prime minister of South Africa in opposition to the country's support for the Allies during World War II. The HNP won a plurality of seats at the 1948 general election despite losing the popular vote to the UP and formed a coalition government with the Afrikaner Party (AP), which it merged with to form the National Party (NP) in 1951; the NP name had previously been used by the party Hertzog merged into the UP.

General elections were held in South Africa on 16 April 1958. The result was a victory for the National Party, now under the leadership of J. G. Strijdom after the retirement of D. F. Malan in 1954. The opposition United Party campaigned for the first time under De Villiers Graaff, who would remain party leader for two decades.

The National Party won 103 seats in the House of Assembly. It was the first election in South Africa with a whites-only electorate, following the removal of the Cape Qualified Franchise in the late 1950s, after the resolution of the coloured vote constitutional crisis. Coloured voters were now represented by four white MPs elected in separate constituencies, after the model introduced for native (black) voters in 1936. As these latter (NMP) seats were abolished in 1960, this was the only general election in which both separate coloured and native (Black) MPs were seated.