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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The Non-Racial Franchise and Afrikaner and Coloured Identities, 1910-1994
Author:Giliomee, HermannISNI
Year:1995
Periodical:African Affairs: The Journal of the Royal African Society
Volume:94
Issue:375
Period:April
Pages:199-225
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:Coloureds
elections
election law
History and Exploration
Ethnic and Race Relations
Politics and Government
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/723779
Abstract:This article briefly looks at the contraction of the democratic franchise in the American South between 1880 and 1910 before it investigates the period of multiracial electoral competition in the Cape Province, South Africa, between 1910 and 1929. The last part of the article discusses the expansion of the franchise in South Africa in the early 1990s and the election of 1994 in which most coloured people supported the National Party - the very party which had disenfranchised them earlier. The article shows that the political lines of demarcation in the case of both the American South and the Western Cape remained fluid for a considerable period after the abolition of slavery. While both blacks and indigent whites were disenfranchised in the American South the white demographic weakness in South Africa generated a quite different response. Here the determination to 'save' the poor whites was the driving force behind the segregationist policies of the 1920s and 1930s. What is striking in both the United States and South Africa is that democratic politics shaped culture and ideology rather than the other way around. Extreme racism only engulfed the American South after 1890 when the process of franchise contraction was well under way. In the Western Cape the 'purified' Afrikaner culture only made headway after the coloured vote had been emasculated in 1931. Notes, ref.
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