However, one question remained after the referendum: would South Africa become a Republic outside the Commonwealth (the outcome favoured by the most Afrikaner nationalists)?
A hardline faction of Afrikaner nationalists, led by D. F. Malan, strongly opposed the merger.
The National Party had been established in 1914 by Afrikaner nationalists.
Smuts suppressed the rising violently, but the failure led to a convergence of views between Afrikaner nationalists and white English-speaking trade-unionists.
The men of AWB are Afrikaner nationalists from South Africa, having travelled back in time from the year 2014, 150 years into the future.
In the imaginations of Afrikaner nationalists, the proposed state is a new Israel, the sacred redoubt of a beleaguered people.
He was one of the first Afrikaner nationalists to speak out against the Broederbond and apartheid on theological grounds.
Sharpeville thus foreshadowed the coming conflict between black nationalists and Afrikaner nationalists over the next thirty years.
But Afrikaners took to the sport like a crocodile to water, and "Afrikaner nationalists hijacked the symbol in the 1930's," Professor Grundlingh said.