Graaff-Reinet (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

Graaff-Reinet was a constituency in the Cape Province of South Africa, which existed from 1910 to 1994. It covered a rural area of the Karoo centred on the town of Graaff-Reinet. 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 constituencies in the rural Cape, the electorate of Graaff-Reinet was largely Afrikaans-speaking and conservative, and with the exception of the inaugural Union election in 1910, the seat was won at every election by the National Party. When the majority of the National Party went into the United Party in 1934, Graaff-Reinet MP Karl Bremer was one of twenty MPs who broke off to form the Purified National Party. Bremer represented the seat until 1943, when he moved to Stellenbosch, but his successors continued to hold the seat by wide margins until the end of apartheid.

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