African Resistance to the 1887 Parliamentary Voters’ Registration Act

Beaurel Visser

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2022, vol. 48, issue 6, 975-991

Abstract: Pressure in the Cape Colony parliament for disfranchising policies was primarily instigated by the Afrikaner Bond. The Bond’s initiatives were based on prejudice against Africans and amounted to an attempt at weakening the influence of English-speaking politicians with the belief that many of them were in parliament because Africans voted for them. An attempt was made through the Parliamentary Voters’ Registration Act of 1887, which implicitly imposed a racial qualification based on the premise that most Africans occupied land communally, and therefore communal tenure was excluded as a qualification for the franchise. This article illustrates the fact that, although Africans did not initially take up the opportunity to participate in the franchise en masse, political participation by the 1880 s was deeply valued by the growing number of Africans who actively participated in the franchise. This is demonstrated by the different attempts made by literate and better-off Africans to remain on the voter registration lists. Through the examination of articles and reports on the experiences and opinions of Africans that were published in the press, African resistance to the passage and implementation of the 1887 Parliamentary Voters’ Registration Act is illuminated through examples of their efforts to register as voters, to mobilise in defence of African interests and to participate in Cape Colony politics through the vote.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2023.2167392 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:48:y:2022:i:6:p:975-991

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2023.2167392

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().