Klip River (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

Klip River
Kliprivier
Former constituency for the South African House of Assembly
Location of Klip River within South Africa (1981)
Province	Natal
Electorate	15,107 (1989)
Former constituency
Created	1910 1966
Abolished	1953 1994
Number of members	1
Last MHA	J. W. Maree (NP)
Replaced by	KwaZulu-Natal (1994)

Klip River (Afrikaans: Kliprivier) was a constituency in the Natal Province of South Africa, which existed from 1910 to 1953 and again from 1966 to 1994. It covered a region of northwestern Natal along its namesake river, centred on the town of Ladysmith. 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. The franchise used in the Natal Colony, while theoretically not restricted by race, was significantly less liberal than that of the Cape, and no more than a few hundred non-white electors ever qualified. In 1908, an estimated 200 of the 22,786 electors in the colony were of non-European descent, and by 1935, only one remained.^[1] By 1958, when the last non-white voters in the Cape were taken off the rolls, Natal too had an all-white electorate. 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, which remained the case until the end of apartheid and the introduction of universal suffrage in 1994.^[2]

While most of Natal's white population (and, consequently, most of its electorate during the pre-1994 era) was English-speaking, the northwest of the province was more mixed, and Klip River had a large Afrikaner presence throughout its existence. This made its politics (along with the neighbouring seats of Newcastle and Vryheid) different from those of Natal as a whole, and the National Party had a significant foothold in the seat from its founding. However, while some elections were closely fought, the Nationalists never took the seat in its first iteration. The seat's first MP, Henry Wiltshire, left parliament just after the 1915 general election, and the resulting by-election was won unopposed by cabinet minister Henry Burton, who had lost his seat of Albert in the Cape Province. Burton was seen as a liberal within the governing party, supporting the non-racial franchise and having strong ties to the SANNC, and served as Minister of Finance during his time as member for Klip River. In that role, he became best known for passing a series of austerity budgets, and the unpopularity of those measures helped cause the SAP's defeat at the 1924 general election. Burton moved to Ladismith in the Cape for that election, and while he lost his race, Klip River stayed with the SAP by a narrow margin. A sequence of SAP and United Party MPs followed, which was broken at the watershed 1948 general election, in which the Afrikaner Party (a pro-Hertzog faction of the United Party that had elected not to follow Hertzog himself into the Herenigde Nasionale Party, but which was closely allied to the HNP) captured both Klip River and Vryheid.

Klip River disappeared from the electoral map in 1953, but returned in 1966, and in its second iteration was a safe seat for the governing National Party. Its most notable MP during this period was Theo Gerdener, who was elected in a 1970 by-election following his time as Administrator of Natal. During his time as MP for Klip River, he served as Minister of Internal Affairs, but grew disillusioned with John Vorster's hard line and broke away from the governing party in 1973, forming his own short-lived Democratic Party. This party did not see any success in the following year's general election, and Klip River was retaken by the NP by a strong margin. They would hold the seat until its abolition in 1994, facing mainly Conservative Party opposition in later years.

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