Caledon (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

Caledon, known as Caledon-Bredasdorp for the 1953 election, was a constituency in the Cape Province of South Africa, which existed from 1910 to 1958 and again from 1966 until 1994. Named after the town of Caledon, it covered part of the Overberg region. Throughout its existence it elected one member to the House of Assembly and one to the Cape Provincial Council.

When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, the electoral qualifications in use in each pre-existing colony were kept in place. The Cape Colony had implemented a “colour-blind” franchise known as the Cape Qualified Franchise, which included all adult literate men owning more than £75 worth of property (controversially raised from £25 in 1892), and this initially remained in effect after the colony became the Cape Province. As of 1908, 22,784 out of 152,221 electors in the Cape Colony were “Native or Coloured”. Eligibility to serve in Parliament and the Provincial Council, however, was restricted to whites from 1910 onward.

The first challenge to the Cape Qualified Franchise came with the Women's Enfranchisement Act, 1930 and the Franchise Laws Amendment Act, 1931, which extended the vote to women and removed property qualifications for the white population only – non-white voters remained subject to the earlier restrictions. In 1936, the Representation of Natives Act removed all black voters from the common electoral roll and introduced three “Native Representative Members”, white MPs elected by the black voters of the province and meant to represent their interests in particular. A similar provision was made for Coloured voters with the Separate Representation of Voters Act, 1951, and although this law was challenged by the courts, it went into effect in time for the 1958 general election, which was thus held with all-white voter rolls for the first time in South African history. The all-white franchise would continue until the end of apartheid and the introduction of universal suffrage in 1994.^[1]

Like many rural constituencies across the Cape, Caledon had a largely Afrikaans-speaking electorate. Throughout its existence, it only changed hands twice – in 1934, when the South African Party merged into the United Party, and in 1953, when the UP lost the seat to the ascendant National Party. Its first MP, Joel Krige, was the uncle-in-law of Jan Smuts and represented the seat until his death in 1933, serving as Speaker of the House of Assembly between 1915 and 1924. The seat became marginal after Krige’s death, seeing several strong contests by the National Party and nearly falling to them in 1948. In 1953, with the creation of False Bay and the abolition of Bredasdorp, the newly-rechristened Caledon-Bredasdorp became a significantly more rural constituency, and this was enough to secure it for former Bredasdorp MP Dirk Uys. In 1958, the seat was split between False Bay and Hottentots Holland, and Uys moved to the former seat.

In its second iteration, from 1966 to 1994, Caledon was a safe seat for the National Party. The recreated seat's first MP was Frank Waring, former Springboks rugby player and one of few English-speakers in the cabinet of Hendrik Verwoerd. Waring retired from politics in 1972, but the seat remained safe for the NP, going unopposed for much of the 1970s and seeing only weak contests by the liberal opposition in the 1980s.

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