17th South African Parliament

The 17th South African Parliament was the seventeenth Parliament of South Africa to convene since the unification of South Africa in 1910 and the fifth to convene since the adoption of the republican constitution in 1961. It was constituted as a bicameral parliament, consisting of the Senate elected in the 1974 Senate election and the House of Assembly elected in the 1977 general election. The Senate contained 51 senators and the House of Assembly 165 members. The Senate was abolished effective 1 January 1981, while the House of Assembly continued to sit as a unicameral parliament for another three months, until the 1981 general election.

Four parties were represented in this parliament: the National Party (NP), the Progressive Federal Party (PFP), the New Republic Party (NRP), and the South African Party (SAP). The National Party held wide majorities in both houses: 42 out of 54 seats in the Senate and 134 out of 165 seats in the House of Assembly.

The following is a list of senators as of April 1980. The 10th Senate had been elected in May 1974, and served until the Senate's abolition at the end of 1980.^[1]

Senators marked (C) were nominated "on the ground of thorough acquaintance, by reason of official experience or otherwise, with the interests of the Coloured population of the province for which nominated".

The table below gives the number of registered voters (all of whom were classified as white under the apartheid legislation) and parliamentary seats, on the day of the election, broken down by province.^[2] The provinces are those which existed prior to 1994.

The following is a list of MPs elected in the 1977 general election to the 17th House of Assembly, which sat until the 1981 general election.^[3]

• South Africa 1980/81: Official Yearbook of the Republic of South Africa, (Chris van Rensburg Publications)