Wakkerstroom (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

Wakkerstroom was a constituency in the Transvaal Province of South Africa, which existed from 1910 to 1974. It covered a rural area in the eastern Transvaal, centred on the town of Wakkerstroom. Throughout its existence it elected one member to the House of Assembly and one to the Transvaal Provincial Council.

When the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910, the electoral qualifications in use in each pre-existing colony were kept in place. In the Transvaal Colony, and its predecessor the South African Republic, the vote was restricted to white men, and as such, elections in the Transvaal Province were held on a whites-only franchise from the beginning. The franchise was also restricted by property and education qualifications until the 1933 general election, following the passage of the Women's Enfranchisement Act, 1930 and the Franchise Laws Amendment Act, 1931. From then on, the franchise was given to all white citizens aged 21 or over. Non-whites remained disenfranchised until the end of apartheid and the introduction of universal suffrage in 1994.^[1]

Like most of the rural Transvaal, Wakkerstroom was a conservative seat and had a largely Afrikaans-speaking electorate. It was first taken by the National Party in 1924, and when the NP merged into the United Party in 1934, Wakkerstroom's MP Pieter van der Merwe Martins joined neither the UP nor the dissident Purified National Party. He instead stood for re-election in 1938 as an independent, and lost out to the United Party's William Richard Collins, former MP for Ermelo. Collins died in 1944, and the resulting by-election saw the seat fall to the Herenigde Nasionale Party, four years ahead of the party's nationwide election victory in 1948.

^{[2] [3] [4]}