Liberal Party of South Africa | |
|---|---|
 | |
| President | Margaret Ballinger Alan Paton |
| Chairman | Dr. Oscar Wolheim Peter Brown |
| Founded | 9 May 1953 |
| Dissolved | 1968 |
| Ideology | Liberalism Anti-Apartheid |
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|---|
 South Africaportal |
The Liberal Party of South Africa was a South African political party from 1953 to 1968.
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The party was founded on 9 May 1953 at a meeting of the South African Liberal Association in Cape Town. [1] Essentially it grew out of a belief that the United Party was unable to achieve any real liberal progress in South Africa. Its establishment occurred during the "Coloured Vote" Constitutional Crisis of the 1950s, and the division of the Torch Commando on the matter of mixed membership.
Founding members of the party included (original positions in the party given):
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For the first half of its life the Liberal Party was comparatively conservative, and saw its task primarily in terms of changing the minds of the white electorate. It leaned towards a qualified franchise.
This changed in 1959–1960. The Progressive Party, formed from a number of disgruntled United Party MPs in 1959, emerged on the political ground the Liberal Party had occupied up until then. In 1960 the Sharpeville massacre and consequent State of Emergency, during which black organisations were banned and several Liberal Party members were detained, changed the outlook of the party. Another factor was the use of simultaneous translation equipment at party congresses, which enabled black rural members to speak uninhibitedly for the first time. The party reached a peak of four MPs in the South African House of Assembly, all of them from the "Native" representatives, elected under the Cape Qualified Franchise. [9]
In 1960, after the passing of the Promotion of Bantu Self-government Act, the Native representative MPs were abolished, and so the Liberal Party was left without parliamentary representation. The Progressive Party, following the split, had seven but lost all but one in the 1961 general election. The Progressive Party hence came to emerged as the more "relevant" political arm against apartheid, although its programme was more modest, favouring a qualified (but strictly non-racial) franchise akin to the old Cape franchise, indeed similar to that enacted in Rhodesia in 1961. [10]
In the 1960s, therefore, the Liberal Party had evolved into the party unequivocally for a democratic nonracial South Africa, with "one man, one vote" as its franchise policy.
The Liberal Party, despite its opposition to the bantustan system of limited black self-government, also supported liberal candidates in the Transkei elections, and helped its rural members and others, especially in Natal, to resist the ethnic cleansing brought about by the forced removal of black South Africans to bantustans and, to a lesser degree, white South Africans from them. This opposition resulted in the banning of several party members and leaders. Among the black representatives of the Liberal Party Eddie Daniels, a political activist, spent fifteen years on Robben Island concurrent to Nelson Mandela's serving his life sentence there.
The newspaper Contact was closely tied to the Liberal Party, although officially it was a separate publication. The link is described by Callan as follows:
"Nevertheless, Contact has become so invariably associated in the public mind with the Liberal Party that it now seems merely academic to insist on its independent status." [1]
It may, however, be more accurate to tie the paper to Patrick Duncan than the Liberal Party. [11]
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The party was in direct conflict with the South African government from the outset. This was due largely to the party's opposition to apartheid and criticism of the erosion of human rights by laws allowing detention without trial and arbitrary suppression of political opposition. Many of its members were placed under bans and persecuted by the South African government, which accused the party of furthering the aims of Communism.
In 1968 the South African government passed the so-called Prohibition of Improper Interference Act, which banned parties from having a multiracial membership. The Liberal Party was therefore forced to choose between disbanding or going underground, and in 1968 chose to disband. [2] The final meeting was held in The Guildhall, Durban.
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Alan Stewart Paton was a South African writer and anti-apartheid activist. His works include the novels Cry, the Beloved Country, Too Late the Phalarope and the short story The Waste Land.
A Bantustan was a territory that the National Party administration of South Africa set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa, as a part of its policy of apartheid.
The Democratic Party (DP) was the name of the South African political party now called the Democratic Alliance. Although the Democratic Party name dates from 1989, the party existed under other labels throughout the apartheid years, when it was the Parliamentary opposition to the ruling National Party's policies.
The Democratic Alliance is a South African political party and the official opposition to the ruling African National Congress (ANC). The party is broadly centrist, and has been attributed both centre-left and centre-right policies. It is a member of Liberal International and the Africa Liberal Network. The DA traces its roots to the founding of the anti-apartheid Progressive Party in 1959, with many mergers and name changes between that time and the present. The DA ideologically shows a variety of liberal tendencies, including social liberalism, classical liberalism, and conservative liberalism.
The United Party was a political party in South Africa. It was the country's ruling political party between 1934 and 1948.
The Progressive Party was a liberal party in South Africa which, during the era of apartheid, was considered the left wing of the all-white parliament. The party represented the legal opposition to apartheid within South Africa's white minority. It opposed the ruling National Party's racial policies, and championed the rule of law. For 13 years, its only member of parliament was Helen Suzman. It was later renamed the Progressive Reform Party in 1975, and then Progressive Federal Party in 1977. The modern Democratic Alliance considers the party to be its earliest predecessor.
The Progressive Federal Party (PFP) was a South African political party formed in 1977 through merger of the Progressive and Reform parties, eventually changing its name to the Progressive Federal Party. For its duration was the main parliamentary opposition to apartheid, instead advocating power-sharing in South Africa through a federal constitution. From the 1977 election until 1987 it was the official opposition of the country.
Liberalism in South Africa has encompassed various traditions and parties.
Apartheid was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was characterised by an authoritarian political culture based on baasskap, which ensured that South Africa was dominated politically, socially, and economically by the nation's minority white population. In this minoritarian system, there was social stratification, where white citizens had the highest status, followed by Indians and Coloureds, then Black Africans. The economic legacy and social effects of apartheid continue to the present day, particularly inequality.
Peter McKenzie Brown was a founding member of the Liberal Party of South Africa and succeeded Alan Paton as its national chairman in 1958.
Leo Kuper was a South African sociologist specialising in the study of genocide.
The National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) was an important force for liberalism and later radicalism in South African student anti-apartheid politics. Its mottos included non-racialism and non-sexism.
The system of racial segregation and oppression in South Africa known as apartheid was implemented and enforced by many acts and other laws. This legislation served to institutionalize racial discrimination and the dominance by white people over people of other races. While the bulk of this legislation was enacted after the election of the National Party government in 1948, it was preceded by discriminatory legislation enacted under earlier British and Afrikaner governments. Apartheid is distinguished from segregation in other countries by the systematic way in which it was formalized in law.
The Reform Party was an anti-apartheid political party that existed for just five months in 1975 and is one of the predecessor parties to the Democratic Alliance. The Reform Party was created on 11 February by a group of four Members of Parliament (MPs) who left the United Party under the guidance of the leader of the United Party in the Transvaal, Harry Schwarz, who became the party's leader. Schwarz and others were staunchly opposed to apartheid and called for a much more rigorous opposition to the National Party. They said that they no longer felt the UP was "the vehicle in which we can travel the path of verligtheid". The party had four MPs, two senators, ten members of the Transvaal Provincial Council, 14 out of the 36 Johannesburg City Councillors and four Randburg City Councillors. This made it the official opposition in the Transvaal Provincial Council.
The South African Liberal Students' Association (SALSA) exists to unify liberal student organisations across South African campuses. SALSA is the ideological descendant of the South African Liberal Association (SALA) (1936–1968), the first non-racial political organisation in South Africa, gathering many of its liberal principles and goals in its founding constitution. SALSA is a student organisation which is not aligned with any political party; and which believes in, practices and promotes the principles of liberal democracy on campuses.
Although the Democratic Alliance of South Africa in its present form is fairly new, its roots can be traced far back in South African political history, through a complex sequence of splits and mergers.
Margaret Ballinger was the first President of the Liberal Party of South Africa and a South African Member of Parliament. In 1944, Ballinger was referred to as the "Queen of the Blacks" by TIME magazine.
The Prohibition of Political Interference Act, 1968, was a piece of apartheid legislation in South Africa that sought to prevent racial groups from collaborating with each other for a political purpose. This act is thought to have been enacted by the ruling apartheid government to prevent the strong growth of the Liberal Party of South Africa (LPSA), which were made up of South Africans of various races who were against the racially divisive policies of the Apartheid regime government.
The Cape Qualified Franchise was the system of non-racial franchise that was adhered to in the Cape Colony, and in the Cape Province in the early years of the Union of South Africa. Qualifications for the right to vote at parliamentary elections were applied equally to all men, regardless of race.
The Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope functioned as the legislature of the Cape Colony, from its founding in 1853, until the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, when it was dissolved and the Parliament of South Africa was established. It consisted of the House of Assembly and the legislative council.
