The chapter begins with a paradox, namely that the liquor laws were liberalised in the early 1960s at precisely the moment when the apartheid regime was becoming distinctly illiberal. It argues that part of the reason was that the temperance movement had failed to reproduce itself generationally while its influence on the National Party government was marginal. Moreover, Afrikaner nationalists hitched wine to the bandwaggon of cultural nationalism. Successive commissions of enquiry targeted excessive drinking amongst the Coloured population, but attempts to extend the reach of racialised prohibition stalled. Indeed, the racial provisions of the 1928 Liquor Act were repealed in 1962, following the Malan Commission which maintained that the law was being routinely flouted. After a heated parliamentary debate the law was amended such that that wine could be purchased by all South Africans. Moreover, the distribution became freer with the creation of grocers’ licences for wine and promises of intervention to reverse vertical integration in the liquor industry. This outcome signalled a defeat for temperance interests and pointed to the greater influence wielded by the wine lobby.

The new apartheid government under D. F. Malan proved adept at using science for its own purposes. The 1949 ‘African Charter’ promoted science and technology as a means to secure regional domination and South Africa’s position as a bulwark of anti-communism. South Africa’s Antarctic research programme regained momentum in the context of the Cold War. The IDC sponsored SASOL, based on an oil-from-coal chemical process, and phosphate-based fertilisers by means of a new parastatal, FOSKOR. Platinum, discovered by Hans Merensky, came of age in the 1970s. Uranium was enriched at a secret plant at Valindaba. The apartheid state also invested heavily in dam construction, hydro-electric power, and irrigation. Agricultural ‘Betterment’ schemes were imposed in the black homelands or Bantustans. From the mid-1970s, state resources were devoted to support weapon production and develop a nuclear capability, and optical astronomy was consolidated under the South African Astronomical Organisation at Sutherland. A major scientific achievement was the world’s first human heart transplant in 1967. Botany, agronomy and biodiversity were major areas of research, as was wildlife conservation. It is therefore possible to distinguish between science under apartheid and apartheid science designed to underpin white supremacy.