South African elections in the 1980s

[Estrella]

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)

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

Everyone’s chasing the Hillbrow gay vote

Nobody knows how many gay voters there are in Hillbrow. No survey has been done, and few people are willing to hazard a guess, but the NP and DP are certainly taking the gay vote seriously, both parties having placed ads in the gay publication, Exit. Candidates and campaign workers say that many voters who are registered in Hillbrow are no longer resident there, and at least half are as yet untraced, increasing the importance of the Hillbrow gay community’s vote.

It is the general opinion among gay voters that it was their vote that put Leon de Beer (NP) in parliament in 1987. He was the first parliamentary candidate to advertise in Exit. One of the DP’s adverts says that the party plans to take the issue of the criminalisation of gay activities to parliament, and will support all plans to open a full-time Gay Crisis Centre in Johannesburg. The DP’s standpoint is that gay rights fall under the broader human rights for which the party is campaigning. ”We are against discrimination of any kind,” says Lester Fuchs, DP candidate in Hillbrow.

Fuchs has also promised to pay attention to the lowering of the age of consent for gay sex. ”Don’t use gays in elections!” shouts the full-page advert placed in Exit by Tony Wasserman (NP), somewhat cryptically. In clarification, Wasserman told the Weekly Mail that he was paying no special attention to gay voters or specifically addressing himself to any gay issues. It was part of an all-over election strategy to reach as many voters as possible, he said. ”They are playing a game,” was the comment of TJ Ferreira, CP candidate for Hillbrow. In his view, the DP is being ”dishonest”, as they will not be able to address these issues in parliament. ”We know that the DP would also like to take the MDM issue to parliament,” he said.

Commenting on the anti-gay sentiments expressed by CP members such as Fred Rundle in the past, Ferreira said that ”each person has the right to his own thinking”. Ferreira said that if he felt it would benefit his business, he himself would advertise in Exit. Exit (itself under threat of banning, because of action instigated by Rundle) has paid significant attention to the upcoming election, with the headline ”Vote for gay survival” on an editorial in its latest edition.

The response of gay voters to the election farrago is not, however, very enthusiastic. One gay man of 42 who has lived in Hillbrow for 14 years said: ”Maybe the DP can come up with something, but in any case maybe a lot of gays in Hill brow will even vote CP, because they don’t want the area to go black.” ”A lot of gays are very conservative and they vote Nat without thinking,” he added.

So that was Hillbrow. Meanwhile, about 50 kilometres away in Voortrekkerhoogte... I put what happened there in a spoiler tag because it really isn't light reading.

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aversion_Project

Between 1971 and 1989, victims were submitted to chemical castration and electric shock treatment meant to cure them of their homosexuality. During the course of the shock therapy, treatment electrodes were strapped to the upper arm with wires, then run through a dial calibrated from 1 to 10, varying the current. Homosexual soldiers were shown black and white pictures of a naked man and were encouraged to fantasize, at which point the person-in-charge would administer a shock if the soldiers showed any form of sexual response and voltage was increased throughout the treatment if the soldiers continued to exhibit sexual responses.

After the conversion therapy was noticeably failing, staff came up with an alternative. As a result, whenever treatments would not work, they put patients through a sex change operation. This included being put through surgery and being given a new identity. Patients would then be discharged from the military, and advised to cut themselves off from family and friends. As many as 900 homosexuals, mostly 16–24 year-olds who had been drafted, had surgical procedures to alter their genitals and given birth certificates to fit their modified anatomy. This surgery was done in military hospitals and a high rate of patients died during surgery. Additionally, the reassignments were often incomplete, leaving patients with a halfway finished procedures.

[Estrella]

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

[Estrella]

It's peculiar because this information must surely exist? Laws must surely have been passed that deliminated boundaries, and yet...

In the RSA Constitution Act 1983, there's an overlong and overcomplicated section specifically dealing with "delimination of electoral divisions". The relevant parts are:

(1) At intervals of not less than five years and not more than 10 years, commencing, in the case of the House of Assembly, from the last delimitation of its electoral divisions in terms of the previous Constitution, and, in the case of the House of Representatives or the House of Delegates, from the first delimitation of electoral divisions of the House in question in terms of this Act, the State President shall appoint a delimitation commission consisting of three judges of the Supreme Court of South Africa, which shall, subject to the provisions of section 41 (2), 42 (2) or 43 (2), as the case may be, divide the Republic, for the purpose of the election of directly elected members of the House in question, into the same number of electoral divisions as the number of such members of that House, in such a manner that no electoral division is situated partly in one province and partly in another province.

(1) A delimitation commission, having delimited the electoral divisions of a House, shall submit to the State President-

(a) a list of the electoral divisions, with the names given to them by the commission and a description of the boundaries of each division;

(b) a map or maps showing the electoral divisions into which the provinces have been divided;

(c) such further particulars as it considers necessary.

(2) The State President may refer to the commission for its consideration all matters relating to such list or arising out of the powers or duties of the commission.

(3) The State President shall by proclamation in the Gazette make known the names and boundaries of the electoral divisions as finally settled and certified by the commission, or a majority thereof, and thereafter, until there shall be a redivision, the electoral divisions so named and defined shall be the electoral divisions of the House in question in the Republic and the provinces.

So it should be somewhere in the Gazette, right? If there isn't a delimination done according to this law (did that comission even come up with anything anyway? Not if it was like other Botha "reforms"), then perhaps there could be some from before the new constitution was put in place.

According to neverending lists of Acts of the Parliament of South Africa on Wikipedia, there were various Electoral Amendment Acts and Electoral Law Amendments passed every couple of years up until 1983, though quite a lot of them dealt specifically with Indians. The Government Gazette archive doesn't have anything older than 2006. There are some older editions of the Gazette on other websites, but anything from before 1994 is very hard to find and none contain what I'm looking for. The LegalB database of primary legislation has an even more exhaustive list by year, with a nice little button labelled "LINK" next to every Act... except 99% of those don't link to anything. There's even a nice little list of every election-related or constitution-related Act, and it's not there either. Plus, even the links that do work mostly consist of lists of sections followed by "repealed by Act blabla etc".

But I did find what I thought to be the text of one of those Acts elsewhere, something called "1983 No 104 Electoral Amendment":

BE IT ENACTED by the General Assembly of New Zealand in Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:

Ah fxck.

After that, I went looking some more and found the only actually South African Electoral Whatever Act, that of 1984. Yay! Except...

1. it wasn't listed anywhere (okay, that might not be such a big problem)
2. it's scanned but didn't go through OCR, so you can't search for a term and you need to read the whole thing
3. it's an amendment, so it's mostly a long string of incomprehensible "the substitution in subsection (1) thereof for the words preceding paragraph (a) of the following words" and such
4. it mostly deals with a whole bunch of technicalities wrt registration of Coloured and Indian voters in preparation for the Tricameral Parliament, but there's nothing concrete about electoral districts there, except references to the aforementioned sections of the 1983 constitution.

And that's it. There's nothing else out there, on the internet at least. And I found that one Act on the website of the Library of US Congress!

tl;dr no

[Estrella]

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.

[Estrella]

(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)}

[Estrella]

What parochial boy pointed out has been fixed and I decided to have a go at 1987 - I think there's enough info in the article for that, though there may be some errors.

[Estrella]

ta-da!

[Estrella]

[Estrella]

1974, the last hurrah of the old United Party and that poor sod De Villiers Graaff. How he didn't go mad after twenty-one years as the leader of an increasingly pathetic opposition is beyond me.

[Estrella]

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.

[Estrella]

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?