Waterberg (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

Waterberg was a constituency in the Transvaal Province of South Africa, which existed from 1910 to 1994. It covered the Waterberg region of the western Transvaal. 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, Lichtenburg had a largely Afrikaans-speaking electorate, and it was a highly conservative seat throughout its existence. Its political history was dominated by two MPs, both originally elected for the National Party. The first, J. G. Strijdom, was first elected in 1929 and served until his death in 1958. He was the only Transvaal MP to join D. F. Malan's Purified National Party in 1934, and kept the loyalty of his electorate through the Smuts years, when the United Party was dominant elsewhere in the province. In 1954, on Malan's death, he was made Prime Minister by the NP caucus, and served in that role until his own death four years later. He was replaced as MP for Waterberg by Joost Heystek, who served until 1971 and was replaced by the seat's other dominant figure: Andries Treurnicht. Treurnicht, who had previously been a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church (NGK), quickly established himself as a leader of the National Party's hardline right-wing faction, including a stint as Deputy Minister for Education where his decision to implement Afrikaans-medium education in black schools triggered the Soweto uprising. When P. W. Botha moved toward limited reforms in the early 1980s, Treurnicht challenged him for the NP leadership in 1982, and upon losing, formed the Conservative Party alongside 22 like-minded parliamentary colleagues. The new party saw significant gains in both the 1987 and 1989 elections, and Treurnicht served as Leader of the Opposition from 1987 until his death in 1993, about a year before the non-racial 1994 general election. No by-election was held to replace him, making him Waterberg's final MP.

^{[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]}