Franchise notes
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 franchise used in the Natal Colony, while theoretically not restricted by race, was significantly less liberal than that of the Cape, and no more than a few hundred non-white electors ever qualified. In 1908, an estimated 200 of the 22,786 electors in the colony were of non-European descent, and by 1935, only one remained. [1] By 1958, when the last non-white voters in the Cape were taken off the rolls, Natal too had an all-white electorate. The franchise was also restricted by property and education qualifications until the 1933 general election, following the passage of the Women's Enfranchisement Act, 1930 and the Franchise Laws Amendment Act, 1931. From then on, the franchise was given to all white citizens aged 21 or over, which remained the case until the end of apartheid and the introduction of universal suffrage in 1994. [2]
History
Despite its Afrikaans name, Pietermaritzburg's white population (and consequently, its pre-1994 electorate) is predominantly English-speaking, and like the rest of Natal, its politics were largely supportive of the pro-British side of South African politics. Pietermaritzburg North, at least early in its history, tended to be the more left-leaning part of the city, and was one of few non-metropolitan constituencies ever to elect a Labour MP - Thomas Gillately Strachan, who defeated incumbent MP and Minister of Finance Thomas Orr in 1920 and represented the seat until 1929. In that year, with the Labour Party split down the middle, Strachan was defeated for re-election by the SAP's William Arthur Deane, formerly MP for Umvoti, who went on to serve until the seat's abolition in 1938. At that point he stood for and won the new unified seat of Pietermaritzburg, which he would represent for another five-year term.
Pietermaritzburg continued as a single constituency until 1974, when it and the surrounding Pietermaritzburg District were reconfigured, resurrecting Pietermaritzburg North and South as larger urban-rural hybrid seats. Where Pietermaritzburg had been a safe seat for the opposition United Party, the two new seats were considerably more marginal - although this was partially due to the UP's general decline in the era. In its second iteration, Pietermaritzburg North changed hands at every election. On its recreation in 1974, it saw a fierce three-cornered contest between the UP, the governing National Party, and Theo Gerdener, a former NP cabinet minister and MP for nearby Klip River, who had broken away from the governing party to found his own moderate-reformist Democratic Party. While Gerdener did better than any other candidate from his party, he still lost, and the DP later merged with the conservative faction of the UP to form the New Republic Party. This new party faced off against the Progressive Federal Party (the liberal faction of the UP, merged with the former Progressive Party) and the NP in 1977, creating essentially the same three sides as in 1974, but this time, the NP won the seat. Its new MP, Daniel Pieter Antonie Schutte, was defeated for re-election in 1981 by the PFP's Graham Brian Douglas McIntosh, but returned in 1987 in a straight rematch. In 1989, the newly-created Democratic Party, which reunified the PFP with parts of the NRP and some liberal defectors from the governing party, successfully took both Pietermaritzburg seats back, and held them until the first non-racial elections in 1994.
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