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13 The Abolition of the Cape Franchise
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202 13 A “Door of Citizenship” Closed The Abolition of the Cape Franchise After a near decade of debate, in the evening of 6 April 1936, a joint session of the two houses of the South African Parliament, abolished, by a vote of 168 to 11, the right to vote of Africans in the Cape Province. It was a right they had enjoyed for eighty-three years. In so amending an “entrenched” clause in the South African constitution, Prime Minister Hertzog had realized a lifelong ambition, and guaranteed —so he believed—that the ballot box would never compel whites to yield power to blacks. Members of all parties rose to applaud Hertzog’s achievement, and editorials the next day compared the prime minister, now seventy years old, to Disraeli and Gladstone. In Britain, however, liberals compared the eleven who had voted “No”—among them J. H. Hofmeyr, the minister of education, the interior , and public health—to Jesus’s eleven loyal disciples after Judas’s betrayal. Most black leaders in South Africa were devastated: for almost a century, the common franchise had been their hoped-for conduit to common citizenship with whites in a multiracial South Africa. In 1936, English-speaking missionaries, too, saw the loss of the franchise as grievous. But in the long years before, their support for the vote had been neither certain nor united.1 Civilization, Citizenship, and the Cape Franchise In 1853, the British government had granted the Cape Colony a representative assembly to be elected under a color-blind franchise. “It is the earnest desire of Her Majesty’s Government,” said the Duke of Newcastle, the colonial secretary, “that all her subjects at the Cape without distinction of class or colour should be united in one bond of loyalty and a common interest and we believe that the exercise of political rights enjoyed by all alike will prove one of the best methods of obtaining this object.” Property qualifications for voting, originally low by the standards of contemporary Britain and its other colonies, were color-blind. But in the late 1880s and early 1890s, the Cape Assembly boosted them, disqualifying (African) communal holdings as property for purposes of voting, and adding an educational test. The assembly’s motives were candidly racial—to disenfranchise Africans newly incorporated through eastward expansion of the colony. Yet the voting requirements remained technically color-blind. The Abolition of the Cape Franchise 203 Between 1892 and 1910, people of color comprised 15 or 16 percent of the Cape electorate. Clustered in a few constituencies (Africans in the East, Coloureds in the West), they numbered, in 1907, more than 30 percent of voters in four of the forty-six constituencies, more than 20 percent in five others. Where their numbers warranted, they were avidly courted by white politicians. Africans or Coloureds were not prohibited from sitting in the Cape Assembly, but none were ever elected.2 Virtually all registered African voters were products of mission schools. Many English-speaking missionaries believed that Christianity and “civilization” should entitle Africans to the benefits of citizenship—above all, to the franchise. Of those missionaries who responded to the questionnaire of the 1903–5 South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC), 78 percent favored some sort of franchise for Africans, compared to only 44 percent of the “native” administrators, and 15 percent of white farmers. Still, many missionaries had doubts about Africans ’ worthiness for citizenship, and hoped that an African franchise would not lead to African majority rule. H. D. Goodenough of the American Board advised SANAC that “it would be necessary . . . to make restrictions so that there would be no possibility of the Native vote swamping the white vote.”3 Dr. Jane Waterston, the Scots missionary and one of only two women to give oral testimony to the commission,4 favored a franchise for educated Africans, but conceded that “you cannot allow the white to be overbalanced by the coloured.”5 A. W. Roberts, acting superintendent of Lovedale, said the educational or property qualifications could be ratcheted up to limit the black vote.6 Other missionaries suggested separate voting rolls or separate councils for blacks. All these proposals would become the stock-in-trade of liberal-paternalist discourse in the coming decades. The Cape franchise, buttressed by a network of mission schools and black churches, had created an African and Coloured elite ardently devoted to the British connection. For this reason, many whites in the Cape—aware that blacks were constitutionally barred from voting in...