Elections are the carnival of the voters - in which they throw out the scoundrels and good-for-nothings. Or so it is supposed to occur. In countries like South Africa, however, the elections usually are different. They are ethnic censuses - the prevailing party represents that biggest ethnic or race group on the basis of who it is rather than the policy that it stands for. In the pre-1994 dispensation it was the National Party, supported by the Afrikaners who composed about 60 percent of the white electorate. Today, with 80 percent of the voters' black, it is the ANC.
There are three kinds of elections. Most elections in South Africa since 1910 have been what could be called confirmation-elections, in which it was a foregone conclusion that the dominant or ruling party would triumph again. The elections of 1915 and those between 1958 and 1987 can be described as such. On the other side of the spectrum are the watershed-elections. In the middle are the future-pointing elections.
We had watershed elections in 1924 and 1948: the two occasions when the governing party was defeated. Both occurred after a great trauma, and were truly a carnival where the voters wanted to reckon with an exceptionally unpopular government. Party leaders were prepared to enter into the most unusual alliances.
The watershed-election of 1924 was even more dramatic than the 1948 one. Two years earlier, the South-African Party government, under General Jan Smuts's leadership, bloodily suppressed a strike by white miners. The police and the army shot dead more than 250. White as well as black people were enraged over the state's use of violence.
Black people could vote only in the Cape Province but the leaders of the Nationalist Party, General J.B.M.Hertzog and Dr. D.F.Malan, reached out to them. Hertzog sent a telegram to Clements Kadalie, found of the black trade union, the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union (ICU), whose motto was "Africa for the Africans." He told Kadalie that nurturing of mutual sympathy between "white and black Afrikaners" was essential for the progress of the South African nation. The Cape NP leader, D.F.Malan, in a message to black voters pleaded for white and black nationalists to stand should to shoulder.
When the NP and the Labour Party agreed to establish a Pact government if they triumphed in the election, they received support from unexpected quarters. The national leadership of the ANC urged black and brown (coloured) voters to vote against the SAP, in effect a vote for the Pact. Most coloureds voted for one or other of the two Pact parties. The Star reported that some communists decided to support the Pact parties. Commenting on this development, Smuts declared that the Red Flag had come to South Africa and that South Africa would have a foretaste of it under a Pact government. In the 1924 election the NP gained 63 of 135 seats against the SAP's 52 and Labour's 18.