The Union Federal Party (Afrikaans: Verenigde Federale Party) was a relatively liberal white South African party that broke away from the United Party after the 1953 election. It never gained any seats in Parliament, and ceased to exist in 1960.
The party was initially led by Senator George Heaton Nicholls who was previously the United Party opposition leader in the Senate. [1] : 305 It was formed on 10 May 1953. [2] : 330 It was founded by members of Torch Commando from Natal. [3] [4] : 254 The party was also said to have support from leaders of the Commando in other provinces. [4] : 254
It was a British diaspora party, committed to retaining links with the British Commonwealth and monarchy. [5] : 145 The party was centred in Natal, concerned with ensuring the province's autonomy. [1] : 305 Federal provincial autonomy was seen as a way preventing Afrikaner nationalism from dominating the political scene and could include ceding from the Union if that occurred or English language rights in the Union were interfered with. [4] : 254 It also wished to explore liberalising the non-white franchise. [5] : 145 The relatively liberal franchise policy for non-whites included Indians to be enrolled on a communal voters roll similar to the Coloureds in the Cape Province and the possibility of a voters roll for Black South Africans who were highly educated. [1] : 305 [4] : 254
The first and major test of the party's electoral appeal was a by-election in the Durban parliamentary constituency of Berea. The party candidate was Col. A.C. Martin, locally popular as a war hero and recent headmaster of Durban High School, but he received only a third of the votes. In the 1954 Natal Provincial Council elections, the party won no seats and only a fifth of the total vote. In the 1958 general election the party did not field any candidates. With Martin as its leader, the party campaigned unsuccessfully for a "No" vote in the 1960 national referendum on whether South Africa should become a republic. After that defeat, the Union Federal Party was dissolved. [6]
Coloureds are multiracial people in South Africa, Namibia and to a less extent, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Their ancestry descends from the interracial marriages/interracial unions mainly between the European and the African with an addition of Asian in the mix.
The Inkatha Freedom Party is a conservative political party in South Africa, which is a part of the current South African government of national unity together with the African National Congress (ANC). Although registered as a national party, it has had only minor electoral success outside its home province of KwaZulu-Natal. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who served as chief minister of KwaZulu during the Apartheid period, founded the party in 1975 and led it until 2019. He was succeeded as party president in 2019 by Velenkosini Hlabisa.
The Liberal Party of South Africa was a South African political party from 1953 to 1968.
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Elections in South Africa are held for the National Assembly, National Council of Provinces, provincial legislatures and municipal councils. Elections follow every 2 to 3 years with General Elections and Municipal Elections. The electoral system is based on party-list proportional representation, which means that parties are represented in proportion to their electoral support. For municipal councils there is a mixed-member system in which wards elect individual councillors alongside those named from party lists.
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A referendum on becoming a republic was held in South Africa on 5 October 1960. The Afrikaner-dominated right-wing National Party, which had come to power in 1948, was avowedly republican and regarded the position of Queen Elizabeth II as the South African monarch as a relic of British imperialism. The National Party government subsequently organised the referendum on whether the then Union of South Africa should become a republic. The vote, which was restricted to whites—the first such national election in the union—was narrowly approved by 52.29% of the voters. The Republic of South Africa was constituted on 31 May 1961.
The Durban Light Infantry is a Motorised Infantry regiment of the South African Army. It lost its status as a Mechanised infantry regiment in 2010 in line with the rationalisation of resources. As a reserve unit, it has a status roughly equivalent to that of a British Army Reserve or United States Army National Guard unit.
General elections were held in South Africa on 15 April 1953. The elections consolidated the position of the National Party under D. F. Malan, which won an absolute majority of the 156 elected seats in the House of Assembly, also receiving the most votes. Its first-time majority of the white electorate would be retained until the 1989 elections.
General elections were held in South Africa on 16 April 1958. The result was a victory for the National Party, now under the leadership of J. G. Strijdom after the retirement of D. F. Malan in 1954. The opposition United Party campaigned for the first time under De Villiers Graaff, who would remain party leader for two decades.
The South Africa Act 1909 was an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that created the Union of South Africa out of the former Cape, Natal, Orange River, and Transvaal colonies. The Act also allowed for potential admission of Rhodesia into the Union, a proposal rejected by Rhodesian colonists in a 1922 referendum. The draft proposal was supported by the four colonial parliaments, but was opposed by Cape Colony premier W. P. Schreiner, who raised concerns that it would strip rights from non-white South Africans.
White primaries were primary elections held in the Southern United States in which only white voters were permitted to participate. Statewide white primaries were established by the state Democratic Party units or by state legislatures in South Carolina (1896), Florida (1902), Mississippi and Alabama, Texas (1905), Louisiana and Arkansas (1906), and Georgia (1900). Since winning the Democratic primary in the South at the time almost always meant winning the general election, barring black and other minority voters meant they were in essence disenfranchised. Southern states also passed laws and constitutions with provisions to raise barriers to voter registration, completing disenfranchisement from 1890 to 1908 in all states of the former Confederacy.
Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era in the United States, especially in the Southern United States, was based on a series of laws, new constitutions, and practices in the South that were deliberately used to prevent black citizens from registering to vote and voting. These measures were enacted by the former Confederate states at the turn of the 20th century. Efforts were also made in Maryland, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Their actions were designed to thwart the objective of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, which prohibited states from depriving voters of their voting rights based on race. The laws were frequently written in ways to be ostensibly non-racial on paper, but were implemented in ways that selectively suppressed black voters apart from other voters.
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.
Poll taxes were used in the United States until they were outlawed following the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Poll taxes had also been a major source of government funding among the colonies and states which went on to form the United States. Poll taxes became a tool of disenfranchisement in the South during Jim Crow, following the end of Reconstruction. This form of disenfranchisement was common until the Voting Rights Act, which is considered one of the most monumental pieces of civil rights legislation ever passed. The Voting Rights Act followed the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which prohibited both Congress and the states from implementing poll taxes, but only for federal elections.
The Coloured vote constitutional crisis, also known as the Coloured vote case, was a constitutional crisis that occurred in the Union of South Africa during the 1950s as the result of an attempt by the Nationalist government to remove coloured voters in the Union's Cape Province from the common voters' rolls. It developed into a dispute between the judiciary and the other branches of government over the power of Parliament to amend an entrenched clause in the South Africa Act and the power of the Appellate Division to overturn the amendment as unconstitutional. The crisis ended when the government enlarged the Senate and altered its method of election, allowing the amendment to be successfully enacted.
There have been many political assassinations in post-apartheid South Africa. In 2013 it was reported that there had been more than 450 political assassinations in the province of KwaZulu-Natal since the end of apartheid in 1994. In July 2013 the Daily Maverick reported that there had been "59 political murders in the last five years". In August 2016 it was reported that there had been at least twenty political assassinations in the run up to the local government elections on the 3rd of August that year, most of them in KwaZulu-Natal.
General elections were held in South Africa on 8 May 2019 to elect a new President, National Assembly and provincial legislatures in each province. These were the sixth elections held since the end of apartheid in 1994 and determined who would become the next President of South Africa.
The National Convention, also known as the Convention on the Closer Union of South Africa or the Closer Union Convention, was a constitutional convention held between 1908 and 1909 in Durban, Cape Town and Bloemfontein. The convention led to the adoption of the South Africa Act by the British Parliament and thus to the creation of the Union of South Africa. The four colonies of the area that would become South Africa - the Cape Colony, Natal Colony, the Orange River Colony and the Transvaal Colony - were represented at the convention, along with a delegation from Rhodesia. There were 33 delegates in total, with the Cape being represented by 12, the Transvaal eight, the Orange River five, Natal five, and Rhodesia three. The convention was held behind closed doors, in the fear that a public affair would lead delegates to refuse compromising on contentious areas of disagreement. All the delegates were white men, a third of them were farmers, ten were lawyers, and some were academics. Two-thirds had fought on either side of the Second Boer War.