Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope

The Parliament of the Cape of Good Hope functioned as the legislature of the Cape Colony, from its founding in 1853, until the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, when it was dissolved and the Parliament of South Africa was established. It consisted of the House of Assembly (the lower house) and the Legislative Council (the upper house).

Prior to responsible government, the British government granted the Cape Colony a rudimentary and relatively powerless Legislative Council in 1835.

The British attempt to turn the Cape into a penal colony for convicts, similar to Australia, resulting in the Convict crisis of 1849, mobilised the local population in the 1840s and threw up a generation of local leaders who believed that far-away Britain was not capable of understanding local interests and issues. This group of politicians, which included the likes of William Porter, Saul Solomon, John Fairbairn, John Charles Molteno, Andries Stockenström and Hercules Crosse Jarvis, shared not only a common belief in the importance of local self-government, but also an explicit commitment to a liberal, inclusive and multi-racial political system.

This political elite successfully began the controversial drive for Cape independence which, unusually, was attained in the end through gradual evolution, rather than sudden revolution.

Queen Victoria granted the Cape its first Parliament in 1853, and the local leadership were permitted to draft a constitution. This was a relatively liberal document that prohibited race or class discrimination, and instituted the non-racial Cape Qualified Franchise, whereby the same qualifications for suffrage were applied equally to all males, regardless of race. The pre-existing Legislative Council became the upper house of the new parliament, and was elected according to the two main provinces of that Cape at the time. A new lower house, the House of Assembly, was also constituted. However, the parliament was weak and executive power remained firmly in the hands of the Governor who was appointed from London.

The Governor opened this first parliament at his residence, "the Tuynhuys", but the House of Assembly soon relocated to the small but stately Goede Hoop Masonic Lodge buildings. The old Legislative Council (now reconstituted as the Parliament's upper house) was housed at the nearby Old Supreme Court building (now the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum).

Among the Cape's powerful local leaders, a radical faction under the leadership of John Molteno pushed for further independence in the form of "Responsible Government". This was attained in 1872, after a political struggle that lasted a decade. "Responsible Government" brought all branches of the Cape's government under local control by making the Executive directly "responsible" to Parliament and electorate for the first time.

There followed a brief boom period in the history of the Cape, with the economy surging, the frontiers stable and local democracy taking root. The new constitution held the non-racial nature of its political system as one of its core values. The universal qualification for suffrage (£25) was sufficiently low to ensure that most owners of any form of property or land could vote; and there was a determination on the part of the Government not to raise it, on the understanding that rising levels of wealth would eventually render it obsolete. There were the early beginnings of a drive to register the many new potential voters, particularly the rural Xhosa people of the frontier region, who were mostly communal land owners and therefore eligible for suffrage. Opportunistic politicians soon followed, to campaign for Black African voters.