Frankfort (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

Frankfort was a constituency in the Orange Free State Province of South Africa, which existed from 1910 to 1953. Named after the town of Frankfort, the seat covered a rural area in the northeast of the province. Throughout its existence it elected one member to the House of Assembly.

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 Orange River Colony, and its predecessor the Orange Free State, the vote was restricted to white men, and as such, elections in the Orange Free State 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]

Frankfort, like most of the Orange Free State, was a highly conservative seat throughout its existence and had a largely Afrikaans-speaking electorate. Its first MP, Thomas Phillip Brain, died in office in 1913, and the resulting by-election was one of the first contested by J. B. M. Hertzog's new National Party - as in the Bethlehem by-election held on the same day, the new party won the seat unopposed. It remained a relatively safe NP seat for the next twenty years, with Johannes Bernardus Wessels representing the seat through most of that time and generally winning around two-thirds of the vote - in 1924 and 1933, he was unopposed.

In 1934, Hertzog joined forces with Jan Smuts and the SAP to create the United Party, a move that was controversial with his Afrikaner base, and nineteen Nationalist MPs broke away to form the Purified National Party under D. F. Malan's leadership. Wessels stayed loyal to Hertzog, however, and on his departure from Parliament in 1935, the resulting by-election saw the UP hold the seat by a relatively safe margin. They held it again in 1938, with Frankfort MP Hermanus Nicolaas Wilhelmus Botha winning the second-highest vote percentage of any UP candidate in the province, beaten only by Colin Fraser Steyn in Bloemfontein. In 1943, however, Botha retired, and the seat was captured by Jacob Louis Bredeus Döhne of the Herenigde Nasionale Party, who held the seat until its merger with neighbouring Heilbron in 1953.

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