Cape Qualified Franchise

[2] On the other hand, there was an additional pragmatic motivation, in that enfranchising the non-white population was seen as a way to bring peace to the Cape's frontier and social harmony to its cities.

[3] When queried by worried white voters on the issue of black citizens voting, William Porter, the Cape attorney-general famously responded: Why should you fear the exercise of franchise?

The commitment to treat Black African and Coloured people as "fellow subjects with white men" was explicitly reaffirmed by the new government, which struck down opposition motions to restrict voting qualifications in 1874, and again in 1878.

Some English settlers in the Eastern Cape felt threatened by it, and their parliamentary representatives, such as John Paterson and Gordon Sprigg, consequently pushed for the disenfranchising of their Xhosa neighbours.

The Eastern Cape Separatist League gradually became the pro-imperialist Progressive Party, which later came to power under Cecil Rhodes and Leander Jameson.

Right wing media outlets such as the Zingari and the Lantern began the habit of disparagingly labelling MLAs who were elected by the Cape Coloured electorate as "Malays", regardless of their own ethnicity.

[9] However the Western Cape's predominantly English-speaking political elite was still strongly in favour of the "£25 vote", with many liberals such as Saul Solomon even supporting its expansion into total universal franchise.

In addition, the Cape's liberal laws recognised traditional Black land tenure and communal property rights, making such forms of ownership equally valid as voter qualifications.

[citation needed] During the late 19th century, as an increasing number of Black South Africans living in the Cape exercised their voting rights, the pro-imperialist white political bloc in the Eastern Cape led by Rhodes and Jameson moved to roll back the political rights granted to the Black inhabitants in the colony.

After coming to power, the nascent Progressive Party, led by Rhodes and fellow politician Sprigg, began enacting legislation to curb Black voting rights.

Prime Minister Gordon Sprigg passed it to prevent communal/tribal land-owners from voting and thus to disenfranchise a large proportion of the Cape's Black citizens who implemented traditional forms of land ownership.

He had earlier voiced his views on Black political empowerment in a speech in the Cape Parliament in June 1887 in which he stated: "My motto is equal rights for every civilized man south of the Zambezi.

We must adopt a system of despotism, such as works in India, in our relations with the barbarism of South Africa" (Magubane 1996, citing Verschoyle [Vindex] 1900:450).

[15][16] The Glen Grey Act was passed by the government of Cecil Rhodes in 1894 and stipulated a system of individual land holding for Black areas.

It also complemented Sprigg's earlier discriminatory legislation by completely excluding property held under this new "Glen Grey title" as a voting qualification.

[17] The successive restrictions of the preceding decades meant that by 1908, when the National Convention on Union was held, only "22,784 Native and Coloured persons out of a total of 152,221 electors" were entitled to vote in Cape elections, even though the franchise system was, at least in principle, still non-racial.

Overall the Act did little to protect black Africans, and ultimately enabled the later apartheid government to gradually whittle away and eventually abolish the Cape franchise.

Although as the Act was challenged in what is known as the Coloured vote constitutional crisis, and not completely enforced until the later 1950s, the last year to see non-whites participate in a general election was in 1953.

After the fall of the Cape's political system, the severely weakened movement survived as an increasingly liberal, local opposition against the Apartheid government of the dominant National Party.

In their fight against Apartheid, the remaining proponents were progressively sidelined as organisations that more fully represented the Black African majority took the lead in the struggle for multiracial democracy.