Ladybrand (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

Ladybrand
Former constituency for the South African House of Assembly
Location of Ladybrand within South Africa (1981)
Province	Orange Free State
Electorate	13,989 (1991 by)
Former constituency
Created	1910
Abolished	1994
Number of members	1
Last MHA	C. E. Hertzog (CP)
Replaced by	Free State

Ladybrand was a constituency in the Orange Free State Province of South Africa, which existed from 1910 to 1994. Named after the town of Ladybrand, the seat covered a rural area in the east of the province, bordering Lesotho. 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]

Ladybrand, like most of the Orange Free State, was a highly conservative seat throughout its existence and had a largely Afrikaans-speaking electorate. It was an early stronghold for the National Party, whose founding leader J. B. M. Hertzog enjoyed widespread popularity with the Free State's Afrikaner population. 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. One of the nineteen was Ladybrand MP Charles Robberts Swart, who, unusually, lost his seat to the official UP candidate Jan Cloete de Wet. De Wet, however, was on the Afrikaner nationalist end of the UP, and left the party along with Hertzog after South Africa joined World War II. He joined Nicolaas Havenga's Afrikaner Party in 1940, and contested his seat under that label in 1943, but like all other Afrikaner Party candidates in that election, placed a distant third. In 1948, the AP formed an electoral pact with the Herenigde Nasionale Party, and Havenga himself was nominated to contest Ladybrand for the alliance, winning by a wide margin.

After the AP dissolved and Havenga joined the NP, Ladybrand became a safe seat for the governing party, being held by them for forty years continuously. As in many other rural seats, however, they began to see strong challenges from the right during the 1980s, with first the Herstigte Nasionale Party and then the Conservative Party winning more and more votes. In 1989, the CP finally took the seat, and held it at a 1991 by-election, one of the last whites-only elections held in South Africa.

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