South African elections in the 1980s

[parochial boy]

It's always been a bit of a curiosity of mine to try and find results from apartheid era whites only elections, because, for all you hear about the leanings of different regions and the Afrikaners and english speakers, it's always seemed near on impossible to actually find anything confirming it.

Anyway, meandering around the internet - I stumbled across a truly ugly excel file, raw numbers only, with those results - spent an hour or so cleaning it up and now I have a file that actually ties through to what the results of the 1981 and 1987 elections were. No idea how I would share it, as at the moment it's just a spreadsheet that would be unreadable if copied in here. And a map is basically a no go because of 1) my (lack) of paint skills 2) good luck finding precise constituency boundaries 3) the issue of what to do with the homelands and townships - which could wind up intensely intricate around smaller towns and in rural areas.

Anyway, to start with - here are results by province at least:

1981
Cape Province
National Party - 43 seats
Progressive Federal Party - 11 seats (predominantly the Southern and Atlantic Coast suburbs of Cape Town ie Anglos and Jews)
National Republican Party - 1 seat (King Williams Town - old anglo heartland in today's Eastern Cape)

Natal
NP - 7 seats (disproportionately inland and more Afrikaans speaking)
NRP - 7 seats (disproportionately on the coast)
PFP - 6 seats (both Pietermaritzburgs - the university? - as well as one random rural one in the Midlands - which is an Anglo dominated farming area, notable for anyone who has ever read the 'Spud' books)

Orange Free State
NP - 14 seats

Transvaal
NP - 67 seats
PFP - 9 seats (Anglos around the North and East of Jo'burg)


1987
Cape Province
National Party - 47 seats
Progressive Federal Party - 8 seat
Independent - 1 seat

Natal
NP - 15 seats
PFP - 5 seats (no more Pietermaritzburg, but the random rural one remains)
NRP -  1 seat (also in the Midlands)

Orange Free State
NP - 14 seats (genuinely shocked the Conservatives didn't win one)

Transvaal
NP - 48 seats
Conservative Party - 21 seats (seem to be especially strong in mining areas, as well was what are now the provinces of Mpumalanga and Limpopo, the latter of which actually voted no in the 92 referendum)
PFP - 6 seats (notably losing the - now notorious - central district of Hillbrow to and NP candidate running on a "gay rights and kick out the blacks" campaign)

Anyway, if there is interest, maybe I'll think of a better way to present the results. Or break them down by modern day provinces, more useful in the cases of the Transvaal and Cape, or even by cities.

[parochial boy]

Interesting.
Did NRP and PFP ran candidates at every seat or was there any attempt to tactical alliance between two parties?

One thing that actually surprised me was quite how many seats the minor parties didn't actually stand in. For instance, in 1981 there were a dozen or so seats that the NP won uncontested (mostly Afrikaner areas in the Western Cape), and in 1987 at least, the PFP only even stood in 3 of the 14 Orange Free State constituencies.

As for the NRP and PFP, basically no. Relations between the two parties were intensely bad, as far as the PFP were concerned, the NRP were as good as supporters of apartheid and were more inclined to support the NP over the PFP. By the 1980s, the NRP had basically also been confined to Natal - where outside of the more, Afrikaans speaking areas they were often battling the PFP for the seat (with the NP a close third).

[parochial boy]

Would you mind sharing the Excel sheet?

Happy to. I'm just not sure of a way to. I thought about loading it in a google docs or something, but I'm not sure I'm so comfortable about making my account details public like that. Is there anywhere you know of where I can just load the file as an FTP or something?

In the meantime, courtesy of the data analytical genius or Mr Sumifs, Mr Pivot and Mrs Vlookup, here are a load of numbers, but that show results for the new provinces and the big three cities.

Things might not be perfect - post '94 name changes meant it was pretty hard to locate places. I'm pretty familiar with KZN* and the Cape was easy enough - but random river valleys in the Transvaal? eh, maybe...

New Provinces '81
Eastern Cape   
National Party   56.39% (10 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   21.98% (2 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   11.31%
New Republic Party   10.32% (1 seat)
Free State   
National Party   72.96%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   25.23%
New Republic Party   1.81%
Gauteng   
National Party   56.62% (45 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   24.04% (9 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   12.10%
New Republic Party   4.874
National Conservative Party   2.49%
KwaZulu-Natal   
National Party   37.44%
New Republic Party   31.97%
Progressive Federal Party   25.73%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   4.57%
National Conservative Party   0.29%
Limpopo   
National Party   60.82% (4 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   28.16%
Independent   9.16%
New Republic Party   1.86%
Mpumalanga   
National Party   59.46% (10 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   32.78%
Progressive Federal Party   4.58%
National Conservative Party   2.31%
New Republic Party   0.87%
North West   
National Party   64.93% (9 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   31.05%
National Conservative Party   4.03%
Northern Cape   
National Party   75.43% (7 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   17.51%
Progressive Federal Party   3.62%
National Conservative Party   3.44%
Western Cape   
National Party   55.52% (25 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   32.90% (11 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   5.98%
New Republic Party   5.34%
Independent   0.26%


new provinces - '87   
Eastern Cape   
National Party   59.28% (12 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   18.19% (1 seat)
Conservative Party   13.80%
New Republic Party   5.07%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   2.56%
Independent   1.10%
Free State   
National Party   55.82%
Conservative Party   36.35%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   6.27%
Progressive Federal Party   1.56%
Gauteng   
National Party   49.77% (41 seats)
Conservative Party   30.10% (8 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   15.76% (6 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   2.27%
Independent   1.46%
New Republic Party   0.64%
KwaZulu-Natal   
National Party   50.22%
Progressive Federal Party   28.16%
New Republic Party   9.82%
Conservative Party   8.87%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   1.87%
Independent   1.07%
Limpopo   
Conservative Party   51.50% (4 seats)
National Party   43.00%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   5.50%
Mpumalanga   
National Party   46.63% (3 seats)
Conservative Party   46.49% (7 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   5.50%
Progressive Federal Party   1.37%
Namibia   
National Party   73.51% (1 seat)
Conservative Party   26.49%
North West   
Conservative Party   47.97% (3 seats)
National Party   46.95% (6 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   4.65%
Progressive Federal Party   0.44%
Northern Cape   
National Party   59.11% (7 seats)
Conservative Party   34.07%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   3.67%
Progressive Federal Party   3.15%
Western Cape   
National Party   61.87% (26 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   19.26% (7 seats)
Conservative Party   11.56%
Independent   3.44% (1 seat)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   2.33%
New Republic Party   1.54%


cities - '81   
Cape Town   
Progressive Federal Party   46.50% (9 seats)
National Party   42.96% (8 seats)
New Republic Party   8.67%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   1.44%
Independent   0.43%
Durban   
New Republic Party   42.47% (5 seats)
National Party   28.50% (3 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   28.27% (3 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.77%
Jozi   
Progressive Federal Party   45.13% (8 seats)
National Party   43.14% (11 seats)
New Republic Party   8.91%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   2.19%
National Conservative Party   0.61%

cities - '87   
Cape Town   
National Party   57.88% (10 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   34.91% (7 seats)
Conservative Party   5.56%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   1.26%
New Republic Party   0.40%
Durban   
National Party   50.74% (7 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   35.21% (4 seats)
New Republic Party   9.94%
Conservative Party   3.43%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.68%
Jozi   
National Party   47.76% (11 seats)
Progressive Federal Party   29.79% (6 seats)
Conservative Party   15.41% (2 seats)
Independent   4.74%
New Republic Party   1.20%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   1.09%


*even then, some funny ones eg the seat of Umlazi - Umlazi is in Durban, easy... except Umlazi is a township, so why does it have a seat? is it the same place? or white areas nearby? hmm...

[parochial boy]

At first I wasn't sure if this wasn't a typo, so I went looking for more info and, um, what

The fact that Hillbrow did actually very quickly "go black" after that article feels almost like poetic justice in that respect. Although that would be downplaying quite how the place fell apart in the 90s.

The PFP candidate did actually win the seat back in 1989 though. And Leon De Beer had a fairly hillarious subsequent journey of going to prison for electoral fraud and eventually trying to get himself elected in both the DA and the ANC. A man of sincere convictions, in sum.

In contrast to that though, Sea Point, which would sort of function as the Cape Town equivalent gay quarter (plus big jewish community), was over 70% PFP in the 1987 election. But Cape Town was a rather more liberal town, as the number would suggest

Couple questions:

1) How free and fair were these elections (for the white electorate)?

2) NP and KP electorates seem fairly obvious. Any major differences between NRP and PFP supporters?

1. AFAIK the elections themselves were at least conducted with a semblance of fairness - see the above case of an NP politician even being convicted of fraud while the NP was in power. I have seen various accusations of the NP committing fraud in its favour, but none seem to have been definitevely confirmed. More to the point is that constituency sizes were - well - not based on any real attempt to divide the population into equal sizes. Legally they could be 15% larger or smaller than the standard size, but in practice you literally have a range from 25'000 votes being cast in urban constituencies in Gauteng, to fewer than 5'000 in rural areas in the Northern Cape.

That said, the elections clearly weren't democratic exercises (2 million votes cast in a country of 30 million people at the time, says enough really) and that goes for whites as well. For instance, even if the PFP was just about tolerated, pretty much everything further left was banned - including for white. And political opponents, including white ones, were still subject to harrassment and arrest.

Likewise the media - even for whites - was not even close to being free. By the 1980s the SABC had effectively turned into a propaganda outfit for the NP; and opposition media (including the Mail & Guardian cited by Estrella) was being banned. Likewise, there was no genuine judicial independence, so the NP could usually find a way to get it's desires implemented by the courts.

Which of course, doesn't change the fact that the regime was popular and had a support of the majority of whites throughout the whole period

2. (and trying to answer Mung Beans' question too). By 1981, the NRP appears to have been an exclusively english speaking party. The constituencies it won were all very english speaking ones in Natal or the historical anglo heartland of Albany in the Eastern Cape. But more to the point, even outside of those areas, it essentially only even stood in predominantly anglophone constituncies. That is, a handful in Cape Town's Southern Suburbs, East London, Albany as well as in the more anglophone constituencies in Johannesburg and the East Rand (typically more English speaking than the western side of modern day Gauteng).

As for who voted for one over the other. Well, the trite answer would be "liberals" and "conservatives". Or to the point, zoning in specifically on KwaZulu-Natal, apart from the Pietermaritzburgs - the PFP won Durban Central (containing notably the technical university and a chunk of the beach front) and Berea (which is a pretty central neighbourhood on a hill just north of the city centre running up to the Umgeni river and is to this day a fairly "cool" area), as well as Pinetown (suburban area in the hills, but no NRP candidate). The PFP's win in Greytown (the rural seat) appears to have come of an almost equal split between all three parties

In contrast the NRP won Umhlanga and Durban North which are swanky beach side suburbs. Umhlanga today is a bit like Sandton in Jo'burg, as in it is reputedly the best suburb and is home to a number of offices and businesses that have deserted the - somewhat - degraded city centre. They also won some suburban areas like Umbilo, but also Durban Point (on the harbour). Today it is a notable hang out sport for cheap hostels, prostitutes and drug dealers; I was told repeatedly to avoid it at night, but durng the day the baechfront is still pretty relaxed).

So based on that, it does seem to be the PFP vote in Durban was a bit more urban, younger, etc... and the NRP more "establisment" (seemingly with a more working class NP vote, even in Durban). predictable stuff. In the other two cities, the patterns are kind of obscured by the linguistic divide. There doesn't seem to be any special difference between the Cape Town southern suburbs (ie on the eastern side Table Mountain) and it's Atlantic coast ones - all english speaking - the NRP only stood in two seats, both in the Southern Suburbs, and lost heavily to the PFP in both.

Same picture in Johannesburg, the NRP don't stand everywhere, get beaten badly where they do, and the only correlation is the number of english speakers. With that in mind though, one of the best indicators of the PFP doing well in both Cape Town and Joburg is a large jewish community, as they were always the white group most opposed to the apartheid regime.

In that respect, the PFP did do better among Afrikaners than the NRP did - at least by the 80s - in part because the NRP basically didn't have any Afrikaner voters at all. There are a handful of urban predominantly Afrikaner seats like Durbanville in the north of Cape Town, and one of the Pretoria seats where - even if they didn't win - the PFP still did get respectable scores.

[parochial boy]

Hmm. You could try using an alternate email? Or, alternatively (if there is one) a link to the sheet's source could also work. No worries if not though.

It was actually a text file that I had to download in csv format then figure out how to delimit to make any sense of. So in that respect, it's probably a bit silly to just duplicate the effort when it's already done. Maybe PM me your email address and I can send it over to you?

There might be a couple of errors in there - I fixed a couple today - but the results tie through to the official ones, so I'm pretty confident it is substantially correct.

Results for the old provinces are easy enough

1981
Cape Province   
National Party   58.39%
Progressive Federal Party   25.65%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   9.35%
New Republic Party   6.05%
National Conservative Party   0.42%
Independent   0.15%
Natal   
National Party   37.44%
New Republic Party   31.97%
Progressive Federal Party   25.73%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   4.57%
National Conservative Party   0.29%
Orange Free State   
National Party   72.96%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   25.23%
New Republic Party   1.81%
Transvaal   
National Party   58.01%
Progressive Federal Party   17.73%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   17.65%
New Republic Party   3.59%
National Conservative Party   2.52%
Independent   0.49%


and 1987
Cape Province   
National Party   60.92%
Progressive Federal Party   16.95%
Conservative Party   14.94%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   2.54%
Independent   2.43%
New Republic Party   2.23%
Natal   
National Party   50.22%
Progressive Federal Party   28.16%
New Republic Party   9.82%
Conservative Party   8.87%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   1.87%
Independent   1.07%
Orange Free State   
National Party   55.82%
Conservative Party   36.35%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   6.27%
Progressive Federal Party   1.56%
Transvaal   
National Party   48.62%
Conservative Party   35.36%
Progressive Federal Party   11.41%
Herstigte Nasionale Party   3.13%

[parochial boy]

Some time ago when I got interested in SA politics, I browsed old threads on here and found some very interesting stuff, including an improvised map of the 1981 election. I suddenly remembered it and I knew it's here somewhere, but I couldn't for the life of me remember who made it or where it was, so I thought it's been lost to time.

Anyway, half an hour of frustration later...

In the meantime, here's something on which I've always sought out more information: apartheid-era white-only elections. I got my hand on 1987 results, here they are in Google Maps:

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=204535606153981578947.0004cb583e8faf4020459&msa=0&ll=-26.833875,31.333008&spn=6.712698,11.634521

Haha, nice to see that he ran into exactly the same issues with locating places as I did - guessing the locations of places based on river valleys or game reserves. That probably is about as good as you could make a map, given the circumstances - I can only see two difference with my numbers at the moment:

1. is that Hash has Innesdal in Pretoria voting NRP, whereas I have got the National Party winning and the NRP not even standing. Considering it's Pretoria, I feel a bit more confident in my numbers there

2. Is Klip River, which Hash's map doesn't have (nope it is there, I'm just blind, but keeping the anecdote because it illustrates the wider point about how hard it is to locate these places), and which my searches seemed to suggest was in Gauteng. Except the file insists it is in Natal, and eventually I managed to trace down a Zulu language wikipedia article suggesting it is near the town of Ladysmith

More to the point though, it's kind of amazing just how difficult it is to actually find this kind of stuff. Like, if you want an electoral map from 1970s New Zealand or Chile - absolutely no problem. But South Africa? Impossible. Which is almost a bit surprising as you'd think there would be a bit more academic interest considering the rather, er, uniqueness of these particular elections. Failing downloading huge datasets from university collections, is Atlas one of the only places on the internet where you can even start to find out this sort of stuff?

[parochial boy]

There is probably some minor official government in Pretoria with access to those gazettes and that is it. I imagine an email along the lines of "hello, I come from an obscure internet forum and would be interested in getting hold of constituency boundaries from some election back in the 80's  - you know, the ones you couldn't vote in because you were legally a second class citizen at the time" would go a long way... er...

In any case. Here is 1989 by new province and city. New provinces because they reveal quite a bit more than the old ones do. But otherwise, I have only found data going back to 1977, which themselves aren't especially interesting because it's the stage where the National party are winning 90% of the seats. 1948 would be fascinating, but that's another thing lost to the annals of time I fear.

New Provinces      
   
Eastern Cape      
National Party   51.79%   (10 seats)
Democratic Party   28.17%   (2 seats)
Conservative Party   19.95%   (1 seat)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.09%   
Free State      
National Party   50.91%   (8 seats)
Conservative Party   46.30%   (6 seats)
Democratic Party   2.40%   
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.39%   
Gauteng      
National Party   46.14%   (29 seats)
Conservative Party   34.58%   (15 seats)
Democratic Party   19.04%   (11 seats)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.17%   
Independent   0.08%   
KwaZulu-Natal      
National Party   45.68%   (11 seats)
Democratic Party   41.06%   (9 seats)
Conservative Party   13.07%   
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.10%   
Independent   0.10%   
Limpopo      
Conservative Party   56.42%   (4 seats)
National Party   41.95%   
Herstigte Nasionale Party   1.63%   
Mpumalanga      
Conservative Party   52.76%   (7 seats)
National Party   44.10%   (3 seats)
Democratic Party   2.77%   
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.37%   
Namibia      
National Party   66.15%   (1 seat)
Conservative Party   33.85%   
North West      
Conservative Party   53.86%   (7 seats)
National Party   45.06%   (2 seats)
Democratic Party   0.81%   (4,7% in Klerksdorp - gold mines & birthplace of Desmond Tutu)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.27%   
Northern Cape      
National Party   56.35%   (6 seats)
Conservative Party   43.44%   (1 seat)
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.21%   
Western Cape      
National Party   53.88%   (24 seats)
Democratic Party   33.03%   (10 seats)
Conservative Party   12.82%   
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.27%   

Out of pure curiosity, the DP's best score in the old Boer Republics outside of Gauteng was 15% in Bloemfontein North. The won two seats - both overwhelmingly english ones - in Gauteng outside of Joburg

Cities      
   
Cape Town      
Democratic Party   48.39%   (9 seats)
National Party   46.68%   (7 seats)
Conservative Party   4.71%   
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.22%   
Durban      
National Party   46.37%   (6 seats)
Democratic Party   46.19%   (5 seats)
Conservative Party   7.27%   
Independent   0.18%   
Jozi      
National Party   43.44%   (8 seats)
Democratic Party   35.20%   (9 seats)
Conservative Party   21.25%   (2 seats)
Independent   0.07%   
Herstigte Nasionale Party   0.03%   
   
   
Interesting that the final obliteration of the United/New Republic Party leaves Durban appearing as a wholly more liberal city than Johannesburg. And that Cape Town is so much more liberal than either, despite it's white population being not too different (ie english majority, but with a substantial Afrikaans population) to Joburg  - at least on the face of it - demographically

[parochial boy]

Yeah, the United Party's 1948 campaign was a thing of beauty. Moves to enfranchise Indian voters, followed by the Natal candidates hurridly disowning that in the face of a single-issue anti-Indian challenge from the likes of the Dominion/South African Party. Smuts promising that whites would remain the "leading race", which would be achieved by enough white immigration for the whites to no longer feel "threatened" by extending the franchise - which worried the Afrikaners who feared they would lose their status as the majority among whites. All on a backdrop of fears about the increasing black urbanisation and fear they would undercut wages for working class whites, Smuts having been perceived by Afrikaner nationalists as too enthusiastic about supporting Britain in WW2. Completel full of these internal contradictions and confusion

Didn't realize Namibia had representation. Presumably the Germans there voted similarly to the Afrikaners.

It did, up until 1977 when it lost its 5 (originally 6) seats as a result of it's "projected" independence - even if in practice that was still a while off.

The one Namibian seat still around in the 1980s was the rather exceptional case of Walvis Bay. As in, Walvis Bay had been conquered by the British in the 1880s, well before South Africa invaded the rest of the territory during WW1, and was incorporated into the Cape Colony rather than South West Africa. The town then remained as part of South Africa after Namibia's independence beforeeventually  being returned to Namibia in 1994. So by the 80's, it was the only remaining seat because, as far as the South Africans were concerned, they were going to keep it (in fact, in 1981 there is no Namibian seat as Walvis Bay was incorporated into the Cape Town Gardens constituency at that time).

As for voting habits, Namibia was a National Party stronghold - only one of it's seats ever didn't go NP, and that was on one solitary occasion. Overall, the Germans did kind of see themselves as fitting quite well into the NP's rhetoric (a deal of anglophobia, aligning sympathies etc... and of course, the German settlement of Namibia, er, makes even the Afrikaners look comparitively benign). But that said, it is worth poitning out that the German community in Namibia is actually pretty small - something in the tens of thousands - and a solid majority of the enfranchised white electorate was Afrikaans.

[parochial boy]

I made a thing. (sorry for ninjaing you icc, in case you made something like this)



Here's the basemap I used, clumsily traced from the above article.

Magnificent! And thank you ICC!

You guys have turned this thread into a real gold mine  

(athough, being totally pedantic, the Orange Free State seat of Virginia should be National Party rather than DP, at least the results I have suggest NP - which seems more likely as no way is a rural seat in the Platteland voting DP)

[parochial boy]

(athough, being totally pedantic, the Orange Free State seat of Virginia should be National Party rather than DP, at least the results I have suggest NP - which seems more likely as no way is a rural seat in the Platteland voting DP)

I thought it was strange that DP won there, but Virginia sounds very English, so I figured it's that

_{(also what did I do to poor Lesotho)}

The reltionship between place names and languages spoken can be delightfully unpredictable... after all, you have places like Worcester, Caledon and Upington that are entirely devoid of English speakers; but also Rondebosch or Pietermaritzburg; or Umhlanga and Amanzimtoti, where English in the main language

(and Chris Hani's murderer was an Afrikaner with the name of... Clive Derby-Lewis)

[parochial boy]

I know it isn't exactly what this thread is for but I'd be interested to see all the election results in Helen Suzman's seat of Houghton please.  Was she ever in danger of not making it into parliament?

We were discussing her over the weekend here - she was a tremendously interesting personality.

She won it unconstested in 1977, by a ~75-25 margin over the NRP in 1981 and about a 65-35 margin over the NP in 1987. So by that stage - as in the stage it wasn't their only seat - it was pretty safe.

As things go for earlier elections... well we have a familiar problem as far as finding numbers goes. In 1961 she won the seat by a ~500 vote / 5% margin (she got 52.4% of the vote) over the UP (and the PP came within 80 odd votes in the neighbouring constituency of Parktown). In 1966 she improved marginally to 52.9% while the PP did worse overall. After that, the trail dries up, but it seems likely that it would have remained fairly marginal until the UP went into it's death throes in the 1970s.

[parochial boy]

I wonder if there were also results and turnout figures for the Tricarmel Parliament for Indians and Colored available as well as the electoral boundaries ?

Yes, I've got results for 1984 and 1989. I haven't shared them up until now out of the logic that they were essentiallya farce with no real legimitacy (and turnouts were consequently, derisory - 30% in 1984 and 18% in 1989 for the coloured election; and around 20% for both Indian ones).

Boundaries would be even more tricky I suspect - all the more as the Coloured constituencies will be overwhelmingly concentrated in the former Cape province and the Indian ones in Natal (iirc, Indians were even banned from living in the Orange Free State).

Give me a couple hours and I'll try to work some logic into them

[parochial boy]

OK here we go, 1984 Indian and Coloured results. I've not split them out by province for the reasons mentioned above, but tried to do something that is a bit more revealing. Old caveats about potential mistakes and stuff but the overall results do tie up with what I expected.

Indian election '84      
   
Gauteng      
Independent   42.14%   (3 seats)
National People's Party   28.45%   (1 seat)
Solidarity   22.42%   (1 seat)
Progressive Independent Party   3.67%   (1 seat)
National Federal Party   3.31%   
KwaZulu-Natal      
National People's Party   40.61%   (5 seats)
Solidarity   36.29%   (2 seats)
Independent   20.18%   (1 seat)
Progressive Independent Party   2.88%   
National Democratic Party   0.04%   
Durban      
Solidarity   41.04%   (12 seats)
National People's Party   35.04%   (7 seats)
Independent   22.38%   (2 seats)
Progressive Independent Party   0.79%   
National Federal Party   0.74%   
National Democratic Party   0.01%   
Transvaal      
Independent   38.86%   (1 seat)
Solidarity   34.83%   (1 seat)
National People's Party   26.31%   
Cape Province      
National People's Party   59.82%   (2 seats)
Independent   23.81%   (1 seat)
Solidarity   16.37%   

I probably should have split Durban between Chatsworth and non-Chatsworth electorates, but... laziness got the better of me. Fwiw "Solidarity" were allegedly a little bit more pro-regime and had higher support among people with Southern Indian origins

Coloured election '84         
Eastern Cape      
Labour Party   81.86%   (5 seats)
People's Congress Party   9.55%   
Freedom Party   6.78%   
Reformed Freedom Party   1.82%   
Free State      
Labour Party   82.98%   (5 seats)
Freedom Party   5.31%   
Reformed Freedom Party   5.17%   
People's Congress Party   3.77%   
Independent   2.78%   
Gauteng      
Labour Party   68.51%   (8 seats)
Freedom Party   19.99%   (1 seat)
People's Congress Party   7.02%   
Independent   3.64%   
Reformed Freedom Party   0.83%   
KwaZulu-Natal      
Labour Party   68.22%   (5 seats)
People's Congress Party   25.17%   
Independent   6.61%   
Northern Cape      
Labour Party   78.52%   (9 seats)
Freedom Party   7.95%   
People's Congress Party   6.55%   
Independent   5.83%   
Reformed Freedom Party   1.16%   
Western Cape      
Labour Party   73.04%   (21 seats)
People's Congress Party   15.03%   
Independent   9.49%   (1 seat)
Freedom Party   1.74%   
Reformed Freedom Party   0.70%   
Cape Flats      
Labour Party   68.10%   (11 seats)
Independent   21.42%   (1 seat)
People's Congress Party   9.58%   
Reformed Freedom Party   0.90%
(Western) Cape Flats      
People's Congress Party   59.09%   (2 seats)
Labour Party   40.17%   (4 seats)
Reformed Freedom Party   0.75%   
Transvaal      
Labour Party   78.10%   (1 seat)
Freedom Party   13.62%   
People's Congress Party   8.28%   
Cape Town      
Labour Party   79.01%   (6 seats)
People's Congress Party   16.09%   
Independent   4.22%   
Reformed Freedom Party   0.68%   
   
On a hunch I split out the Western-most Cape Flats suburbs, as in anything west of Philippi, from the rest of them on the basis that they tend to be wealther (although, actually very, very not the case for a few of them); but more specifically they tend to be more anglophone and more Muslim/Cape Malay than the suburbs further east. Was it worth doing? I think so...

Should maybe have split out the rest of the Western Cape a bit more - but given the one sided nature of the results it wouldn't really have said much

Thanks would be very interested in looking at them. Generally how much was the malapportionment in favour of the white minority? I know that both Tricarmel parliaments could be outvoted by the white parliament but just how bad was the split ?

It was more that there were three separate chambers, so malapportionment didn't really matter in that case as each communitiy elected their own parliament. In theory, each chamber would look after it's own community's matters and then collaborate one ones affecting all three. In practice, the white one had essentially all the say and the Coloured and Indian parliaments were totally subordinate.

The parliaments themselves do seem to be quite unevenly representative in any case. For instance, the modern day Northern Cape seems to be humungously overrepresented (10 seats) relative to the Eastern Cape, which only has 5 despite a much larger coloured population overall. Hard to say for sure though, as there are a bunch of seats that could quite easily cross the boundaries of the modern provinces. For example, the "Outeniqua" seat seemingly covers the entire Garden Route - ie on both sides of the modern day Eastern/Western Cape Border. Same with the likes of Mid-Karoo, which was probably geographically huge.

[parochial boy]

I know it isn't exactly what this thread is for but I'd be interested to see all the election results in Helen Suzman's seat of Houghton please.  Was she ever in danger of not making it into parliament?

We were discussing her over the weekend here - she was a tremendously interesting personality.

She won it unconstested in 1977, by a ~75-25 margin over the NRP in 1981 and about a 65-35 margin over the NP in 1987. So by that stage - as in the stage it wasn't their only seat - it was pretty safe.

As things go for earlier elections... well we have a familiar problem as far as finding numbers goes. In 1961 she won the seat by a ~500 vote / 5% margin (she got 52.4% of the vote) over the UP (and the PP came within 80 odd votes in the neighbouring constituency of Parktown). In 1966 she improved marginally to 52.9% while the PP did worse overall. After that, the trail dries up, but it seems likely that it would have remained fairly marginal until the UP went into it's death throes in the 1970s.

Out of curiosity how does the area that seat covered vote now ?

The ward covering Houghton went 59% DA, 18% ActionSA, 12% ANC in the municipal elections. Pretty standard for a white, anglophone area and probably the only place in the country that has voted for the same party uninterrupted since the 60s.

By the way of comparison, the nearby former safe PFP/DP safe seat of Yeoville voted 39% ANC, 21% ActionSA, 18% DA, 15% EFF - but has seen huge demographic changes since the beginning of the 90s

[parochial boy]

I know it isn't exactly what this thread is for but I'd be interested to see all the election results in Helen Suzman's seat of Houghton please.  Was she ever in danger of not making it into parliament?

We were discussing her over the weekend here - she was a tremendously interesting personality.

She won it unconstested in 1977, by a ~75-25 margin over the NRP in 1981 and about a 65-35 margin over the NP in 1987. So by that stage - as in the stage it wasn't their only seat - it was pretty safe.

As things go for earlier elections... well we have a familiar problem as far as finding numbers goes. In 1961 she won the seat by a ~500 vote / 5% margin (she got 52.4% of the vote) over the UP (and the PP came within 80 odd votes in the neighbouring constituency of Parktown). In 1966 she improved marginally to 52.9% while the PP did worse overall. After that, the trail dries up, but it seems likely that it would have remained fairly marginal until the UP went into it's death throes in the 1970s.

Out of curiosity how does the area that seat covered vote now ?

The ward covering Houghton went 59% DA, 18% ActionSA, 12% ANC in the municipal elections. Pretty standard for a white, anglophone area and probably the only place in the country that has voted for the same party uninterrupted since the 60s.

By the way of comparison, the nearby former safe PFP/DP safe seat of Yeoville voted 39% ANC, 21% ActionSA, 18% DA, 15% EFF - but has seen huge demographic changes since the beginning of the 90s

Did it in 1994? Who actually voted for DP that year? Because they actually got 90k less votes than in 1989.

Ah, you pendant the IEC have helpfully not got 1994 results in that detail available*, but I assume so on the basis that the NA's huge score relative to the DP in 1994 was largely down to Coloured voters in the Western Cape - who aren't numerous in Gauteng, even less so in an apartheid era white suburb, as well as some segment of the Conservative Party choosing the NP over the new FF+. Again, not many of those people in Houghton.

On that basis, my back of a  cigarette packet calculation was that the DP's 5,3% in Gauteng in '94 - which at the time was slightly over 20% white - probably means 15-20% of the white vote. That being a conservative estimate (I would love to see the results from Lenasia and the Indian townships in Durban in 1994 too, on that note). If the DP getting 19% of the white vote translated into around 70% support in Houghton in 1989, I feel fairly confident they won the place in 1994  - but yes that is speculation, and yes I probably should have included that disclaimer. Still a remarkable consistency relative to anywhere else in the country. Although that said, I imagine there are CP seats from the 80s where the white electorate voted FF+ in 2019/21.

*or, as they say themselves, as they didn't run the 1994 elections, which were run by a temporary electoral commission - no detailed data is available

[parochial boy]

IS VF+ still a white-supremacist party or have they kinda moderated ? What do they typicaly do in parliament ?

I would preface an answer by saying the FF+ could have been a lot worse than they actually are. Viljoen's mere decision to take part in the 1994 election did play a certain role in de-escalating the potential for violence among radical nationalist Afrikaners, especially in the light of the Bophuthatswana crisis (where a big far-right Afrikaner militia had attempted to defend the homeland's leader Lucas Mangope against a coup seeking to install a government that would accept its reincorporation into South Africa). Especially in so far as it led most of the radicals to accept the democratic elections and kneecapped outright nazi movements like the AWB.

Otherwise, yes, the party has moderated since 1994. Back then it was largely pushing for a quasi-independent Afrikaner Volkstaat, a concept which these days has essentially dissapeared from view. Overtime it has turned more into a Afrikaner minority interests party, which in recent times has gone through varying (and varyingly succesful) attempts to branch out into being a party representing the interests of all Afrikaans speakers, ie including coloureds. For example, in 2019 it had Peter Marais* leading it in the Western Cape provincial elections; and it also recently supported coloured prison guards in a Black Economic Empowerment related labour dispute. Which is probably a good indication of what they are up to these days, mostly hotly opposing BBBEE and land redistribution, defending Afrikaans language institutions, and basically setting itself up as a minority rights party.

I wouldn't overestimate their coloured support, or the degree to which it might have moved towards a non-racial, purely linguistic outlook tbh. It's electorate remains overwhelmingly white and Afrikaner speaking, mostly people who have deeply dubious opinions regarding race or what they want South Africa to look like.

*An odd character, leader of the People's Congress Party, which won 2 seats in the 1984 coloureds-only election, and a guy who has gone through multiple political, er, transformations since then

[parochial boy]

I see so would you say they are a loyal opposition party in terms of accepting a multi-racial state and the current government? What would you say would be the primarly difference or issue between white Afrikaaners/colored Afrikaan speakers who vote DA and vote FF+ ?

In terms of ther top level rhetoric at least they seem signed up to the democratic state. but how far deep that goes in reality... and they still have fairly close links to organisations like AfriForum who can be, well, problematic lets say. As in advancing the white genocide conspiracy or downplaying apartheid. Thes days you have the likes of the National Front/Afrikaner self-determination party who siphon off the really yikes elements though.

As for the electorate - well no surprises it is principally the rural, conservative platteland electorate that supported the CP in the 1980s - joined by certain more particularly working class or poorer working class urban suburbs.

For example, if you look at Cape Town coloured suburbs like Mitchell's Plain, FF+ get minuscule score. Like, around 0,5% and even behind what EFF get in those sorts of places. In the white suburbs of Cape Town, Joburg and Pretoria (the latter being the only large city where Afrikaners clearly outnumber anlgophone whites - and always the most conservative of the large cities); then the FF+ get better scores but still well behind the DA. Generally better and better the more working class a neighbourhood is, but on the whole still far behind the DA. That contrasts to out in the Platteland where they win the occasional precinct and on the potentially even outperform the DA among Afrikaners. A special mention goes to the Northern Cape where it would seem that there is some degree of a coloured vote for the party - in particular over fears of the migration of Setswana speaking black people - which has actually made the provicne majority black these days, when it was majority coloured back in the 90s.

[parochial boy]

Btw are the Khoisan classified as "black" as opposed to "colored" in South Africa?

Short answer is that they are typically considered as coloured. Longer answer is that the "coloured" identity was built out of a whole spectrum of different groups of peoples, and in practice the randomness of who was assigned as being coloured or not during apartheid was one of the (very) many cruelties of that regime. As a sort of demonstration - both the soccer player Benni McCarthy and cricketer Herschelle Gibbs were classified as being coloured, and well, look at them.

As far as Khoisan people go - the vast majority of people who could be considered Khoisan today are thoroughly Afrikanerised linguistically speaking. It is likely that the coloured population of the Northern Cape do have an overwhelmingly Khoisan background - or some of them at least, a lot are the descendents of eg the Griqua people who migrated from the Western Cape. That said, lots of Coloureds (dare I say, it is what you might call a rather "woke" affectation) including in Cape Town will claim a Khoisan identity in the face of a coloured label that they see as having been imposed on them by the colonialist regimes even before apartheid.

Tl;dr the label "Khoisan" can be a touchy area. But almost everyone that you might consider as being Khoisan will be coloured.

What led to the DP/DA becoming the primary opposition party in South Africa?

That is also a - long - story. But summarising somewhat, the NP went straight head on into a major identity crisis after the first democratic elections. As in, it had no idea how to position itself - whether to be an opposition force, a partner in government, whether to position itself as "non-racial" after all - and attempting to do that having run what was actually a pretty stunningly racist, albeit successful, campaign in 1994 aimed at scaring coloured voters about the alleged imminent arrival of millions of black Xhosa speakers in the previously protected area of the Western Cape.

This all led to a series of defections from the party, in particular towards a DP that had a slightly better struggles related legitimacy, but that was also pretty firmly able to establish its credentials as an opposition party.

Come the 1999 elections, the DP then ran a, what some might call "dog whistle" and others might call "pretty forking racist" campaign using the (oh my god) tag line "fight back". Designed to appeal to white fears about the skyrocketing (at least as white people were concerned) crime rates; insecurity; degraded city centres and public services and Black Economic Empowerment.

(which of course is a source of many of the DA's issues today, as in it has no real conception as to how to hang on to its white electorate at the same time as appealing to a black electorate that - not exactly without cause - is rather suspicious of it. You then have the delightful spectacle of the DA being particularly nasty to the coloured electorate that actually forms the bedrock of its support these days, in the same way as the ANC can be completely callous about the fortunes of poor blacks)

True to form, the white vote consolidated around the DP while the newly coined New National Party was only really able to hold on to its Western Cape Coloured electorate - at which point, clearly on its last legs, it eventually folded into the ANC.

[parochial boy]

A bump with a bunch of results from the 1961 election, as in the Progressive Parties first outing. Key other story in the election was 64 of the ~150 seats were uncontested.

Only two switched between the NP and UP in that particular outing (Pretoria Sunnyside - a university seat; and Queenstown (in the Eastern Cape) - with a  growing - among whites obv - Afrikaner majority). Both went from UP to NP, with the NP only actually losing ground in one seat in the whole country; Humansdorp in the Eastern Cape, which had a rather unpopular incumbent MP.

Anyway the PP-UP match ups: (just showing PP scores because all two way match ups in any case)
In the Transvaal/Johannesburg
Houghton: as mentioned before, Helen Suzman won with a 52.4% vote share
Parktown - PP 49.6%
Johannesburg North - PP 46%
Orange Grove - PP 47.5%

Natal
Pietermaritzburg District - PP 48.9%
Pietermaritzburg City - PP 45.6%
Durban Berea - PP 45.6%
Durban Musgrave - PP  44.7%
Durban North - PP 38.9%
South Coast - PP 31,4%

Cape Province
Sea Point - 35,4%
Simonstown - 20,4%
Salt River - 31,9%

George - 5,3% (this one was won by PW Botha of the NP)
East London North - 28,8%
East London City - 17,3%
Albany - 16,1%

That's not all of them, but it is notable, in respect of it's liberal reputation and the PP's scores in the 80s, the it was notably weaker in Cape Town than in Durban or Joburg.

With Joburg, there is a Jewish thing going on (especially playing an explicit factor in the result in Parktown), but Joburg was also the terrain of the Rand Daily Mail, ancestor of the Mail & Guardian and most explicitely pro-Progressive and anti-apartheid paper of the era.

In Natal, you have a similar story with the Natal Witness which also supported the PP. On top of that, there was a factor of simmering unhappiness over the 1960 Republic Referendum and discontent with Douglas Mitchell, the leader of the Natal UP who was deeply unpopular and perceived as far too conservative, having been one of the ringleaders in kicking the progressives out of the UP in the first place. Pietermaritzburg is also home to the University of Natal, which was a long standing bastion of resistance to Apartheid.

In contrast, in Cape Town - the main local papers stayed loyal to the UP, and De Villiers Graaf was both from CT and very popular there. Meaning more loyalty to the party overall.

Elsewhere, the Wikipedia page on the election suggests that a certain "National Union Party" won a seat in Namibia. This seems to not be true and the NP won all 6 Namibian seats (which it did in every election, then). The NUP won it's seat in Bezuidenhout in Johannesburg, but the confusion seems to come from the fact that the party's founder - and sole elected MP - a certain Japie Basson had previously represented the Namib constituency in Namibia.

Basson was, well, an interesting personality shall we say. He split from the NP over opposition to its apartheid policies to form the more moderate NUP, which having failed to take off, merged into the United Party. Basson himself then wound up a member of the PFP by the 1970s before being expelled from it over his support for the tripartite parliament and finally winding up back in the NP. Totally normal story in sum.

[parochial boy]

Fwiw, the Progressives' policy on voting rights at that election:

In 1960 the PP adopted a franchise policy that was on the recommendations of the Molteno commission. In February 1960, Steytler announced the names of the members of the commission, which was to be chaired by D Molteno, a former natives' representative in parliament. Its members included ex-Chief Justice Centlivres, Leslie Blackwell also a former judge and retired MP), Harry Pppenheimer, JG Strauss formerly leader of the UP ), Dr D van der Ross, and Zach de Beer. Two professors of history, LM Thompson and S Marais, were also members of the commission.

In October 1960 its report was published. It proposed granting full voting rights on the ordinary voters' roll to all South Africans who had passed Standard Eight or its equivalent. Alternatively those who had reached Standard Six and had the attainments of a semi-skilled worker or who were literate and had the attainments of at least a skilled worker should be allowed to vote. Those who were literate and owned fixed property or who had been at any time a voter for the House of Assembly should also be enfranchised. There would be a special voters' roll for those who did not qualify to vote on the general voters' roll. The main requirement for admission to the special voters' roll was passing a literacy test. Voters on this roll would elect no more than ten percent of the members of the House of Assembly in specially delimited constituencies and at a separate election.

As in, no votes for the vast majority of blacks. That is what passed for unacceptably left wing in 1960s South Africa. Phwoar.

[parochial boy]

What was Helen Suzman personal view on all this ?

I've not seen anything that would indicate her taking a line against the party. But in any case, given a context of the time, you wonder the degree that the line the PFP took was basically as far as they could go. Already they basically had to fend off accusations of wanting to hand over power and bring about the expulsion of whites from South Africa etc, etc... That's just what 1960s South Africans were like.

To demonstrate that point, the only party actually supporting universal suffrage at the time was the Liberal Party, who were so marginal that they could only field candidates in two constituencies, which regularly had its members being banned from political participation for "communism" (yes, seriously) and wound up being banned entirely by the end of the decade.

As for the PFP's own policy on the vote - it was still more or less the same as 1974, but it seems as if they were in favour of universal franchise by the 1980s. Of course, by which time the entire context had moved on somewhat and there was a much more opposition to apartheid including on the part of whites.

[parochial boy]

This isn't really an election question, but I figured this thread is the best place to ask: how did South African national identity develop for different groups? Like, for example, when did Anglos stop identifying as British subjects and start thinking of themselves as South African? How about a rural Black person identifying with the country before his tribe, or a Durban Indian, or a Verwoerd-type Afrikaner?

Well that is a huge question that I am probably not really qualified to answer. But if I do the best I can... Afrikaner nationlism is the easiest and most well documented one to trace. It starts to be formulated in earnst by various in particular strict Calvinists in the middle part of the 19th century. Obviously this is in tandem with the arrival of the British in the Cape Province and the resentment that a lot (but not all) of the Dutch had towards this - in particular the way the British unkindly forced them to free their slaves and stuff like that. It then develops a big mythologial push with events like the great treks; later the Boer war which continues to be intellectualised by organisations like the National party and the Broederbond in the early 20th century.

There is often mention of an alleged divide between "Boers" (ie descendents of those who left the Cape) and Afrikaners (those who stayed, were more loyal to the Brits etc...) that does occasionally get mentioned these days. It was a bigger deal in terms of the Nats' mid-20th century internal divisions, broadly speaking the more radical Verwoerdian Nationalism was always more associated in particular with the Transaval ie "Boer" NP, with the Cape Dutch or "Afrikaners" being  comparitively less... out there... with regards to how nasty to be to non-whites. I wouldn't overplay it's role these days though. The defining characteristic of 21st century Afrikanerdom is a massive identity crisis over "what they did", how they are supposed to fit in to modern South Africa and all the rest.

As for how their identity merged into South African national identity. Well, it's an ongoing process - but in some respects almost functions the other way round. In so far as they had to be convinced that other peoples, first the English, then the Coloureds and Africans and Indians all got to be part of "their" South African identity.

In contrast, English South African identity is much weaker. In so far as "English" South Africans are a mix of different backgrounds, mostly British, but lots of Jewish, Eastern European, Portuguese - where the "English" term just became a portmanteau for everyone who didn't speak Afrikaans and adopted english as a lingua franca. That is especially the case in the Witwatersrand; in contrast Natal had a very (very) British identity well into the second half of the 20th century. It actually toyed very seriously with trying to seceed after the Republic referendum, and continued to have the epithet "the last outpost of the British empire" for its Anglophilia for a long while after that. Eventually though, it was things like the Republic, the sense of "white" South African being back to the wall against universal condenmation during the apartheid era that mostly brought them into the fold with the Afrikaners.

For Indians - again you could almost turn the question around. A big part of the experience of Indian South Africans has actually been convincing the rest of the country that they have the right to be there. It took, basically, until the 1960s for the National Party to even come round to accepting that they weren't going to be able to deport the Indians back to India (by which point, they had been in the country for over a century); and race relations in Durban have historically been defined by big tensions between the Indians and the Zulu over access to housing, jobs, land and all of the rest. There were huge deadly riots in 1949 for example, and in 2021 - even if less explicitely about that issue, it was very clearly present at the time. Helps that Durban is also somewhat less segregated than the other two major cities. As in, it has big Indian and black townships on both the north and south sides of town, and less major concentration away from the centre in the way Cape Town has the Cape Flats and Joburg Soweto.

For Coloureds, I've talked about this in the past, in so far as "coloured" is an umbrella term for a lot of different identities and they have never really been anything but South African in practice. Back in the bad old days they always had this sort of debate going on about them as to whether they should be considered as "western" ie "civilised" and should be accepted as part of the dominating group. If anything, there is a degree to which the entirety of South African history consists of shïtting on them to be honest. As they get lumped in as being relative "winners" of apartheid even though their history is one of slavery and exploitation and enormous levels of abuse at the hands of the white (eg look up the "Dop system", nasty stuff really).

Finally, with regards to black South Africans, it is actually impressive how little ethnic nationalism there is when you think about it. I mean, sure, it is there, in particular you often hear about the alleged conflict between the "progressive, liberal" Xhosa (who contributed a huge part of the leadership of the liberation movement. Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela, the Mbekis, Chris Hani, Steve Biko were all Xhosa) versus the "traditionalist and conservative" Zulu, but even that, I mean, compare it to the ethnic conflict you see in other post colonial societies.

The Nationalist government in fact, did deliberately try to play up the "tribal" divisions between different black groups in South Africa. The Bantustans being the outstanding example of this. Which makes it all the more impressive as to how much it didn't work - as to why not. Well, in part you have the likes of the ANC that was set up as being explicitely non-tribal and inclusive. Although perhaps more noteworthy is that even at the time the Nats came to power in 1948, they were already worrying about what they called the "detribalised" urban blacks. That is, the black people who had moved to the cities before the 1940s, and in the multicultural atmosphere of the time had integrated into a more inclusive identity. In fact, quite what to do with these people was an ongoing theme during the entire apartheid era, and it was famously in the townships that a huge part of the resistance to apartheid was drawn from. People living out in rural areas tend to be a lot more Conservative, but even with the mass migration to cities, especially in Gauteng, since the beginning of the 1990s things haven't changed in that respect. Potentially it helps that so much xenophobia can be directed at migrants from the rest of Africa.

Sorry if that's a bit meandering and doesn't fully answer the question. But it's the stuff that I am aware of, and you could probably write an entire thesis about each of those topics.

When did the National Party start trying to get the votes of Anglos?

As hinted in the answer to Estrella, it more or less starts in earnest around the time of the 1961 election. As in the nats hold on power and the tools of proaganda has made white South Africans progressively more conservative as a whole at that point; but in addition in the fall out of the republic referendum the Nats started to take a much more peaceful approach and started talking about "our two peoples" in the face of foreign condemnation and the fact that they were all terrified of the African ever getting into power.

It's around that time that you have the first really NP aligned English political figures (whose name I've forgotten, helpfully), but it's also around that time that the UP are becoming increasingly obviously clueless and directionless and split between trying to be a more liberal opposition party and even trying to out-do the Nats. For example in the opposition of Douglas Mitchelll, the Natal UP leader to the Bantustan policy on the rather opportunistic basis that they entailed white farmers being made to sell their land that would become the future homelands

It was a slow process though, really only taking off in earnest with the final collapse of the UP in the 1970s

[parochial boy]

Yeah, I'd be minded to say that apartheid, at least as it had existed, quite simply couldn't have continued along the lines it had up until then. The boycotts and sanctions, universal international condemnation, the civil unrest, the declining weight of the white population, even simply the end of the cold war meaning the end of the "anti-communism" justfication that had been a huge part of how the regime justified itself by the 80s all effectively made a continuation of things as they were effectively impossible.

The question then becomes - had the settlement that was eventually reached not been reached - how much worse would it have been? I would be minded to agree with Al's analysis, in that respect, something very nasty.

Regarding the Zimbabwe comparison though that there are some fairly meaningful differences between Zimbabwe's and South Africa's white populations. As in that South Africa's population isn't just bigger (these days it's not actually that much larger relatively speaking. Around 7-8% probably compared to the 5% that it topped out at in Zimbabwe). Additionally, because its settlement was so much earlier, what South Africa also has is - especially among Afrikaners - a much larger number of white people who don't have dual nationality in the way that most "Rhodesians" did; and a lot more people who aren't necessarily highly qualified or educated. Both of those factors make emigration less of an option for a lot of white South Africans in the way it was for the white Zimbabweans. Add to that the roughly 10-12% of South Africans who are neither black nor white, and you are left with a situation that never really could be totally analogous to what happened north of the border.

[parochial boy]

Hypothetically, how much of a swing would it have taken for either the Democrats or the Conservatives to win a plurality (or majority) of seats in 1989? I know the Nats had a very favourable map, but at some point the malapportionment and gerrymandering would approach dummymander territory.

It's probably difficult to work out precisely given the three dimensional nature, but if you assume the unconstested seats don't change (9 NP, 2 CP, 1 DP), then my logic goes something like this (which hopefully not too crazy seeing as the number of direct CP-DP contests was essentially zero):

In a two party between NP and DP with the Conservatives unchanged, in order for the DP to surpass the NP they need to win 35 seats from them. That means winning Paarl, where they actually got 15,2% to the NP's 61,9% (and CP in second, which I think more or less writes it off as a possibility)

For the CP to surpass the NP they need to pick up 31 seats, meaning they need Vanderbijlpark on the Gauteng -Free state border. In reality, they lost the seat by an 18 point margin - from that point it only takes a little (like 4%) swing to get to a majority as you have a bunch of mostly Afrikaans seats in the PWV or rural Cape province where the Democrats are taking around 10-15% of the vote

So in practice the NP do look very safe - they would have needed probably to lose pretty heavily in both directions before being overtaken. As much as anything, the Conservatives had 35 seats, and the DP had 62 seats where they didn't stand at all. If nothing else, the level of geographical polarisation between anglophone cities and Afrikaner countryside would have meant either of the opposition parties basically having to clean up in their respective strongholds to even get close to the Nats.