South Africa -- Description and travel; South Africa -- History -- 1836-1909; South Africa -- History -- To 1836
A coloured subject of the Queen in the Cape Colony has all the
privileges possessed by a white subject,--all the political privileges.
The elective franchise under which the constituencies elect their
members of Parliament is given under a certain low property
qualification. A labourer who for a year shall have earned £25 in wages
and his diet may be registered as a voter, or if a man shall have held
for a year a house, or land, or land and house conjointly, worth £50, he
may be registered. It is certainly the case that even at present a very
large number of Kafirs might be registered. It has already been
threatened in more than one case that a crowd of Kafirs should be taken
to the poll to carry an election in this or that direction. The Kafirs
themselves understand but little about it,--as yet; but they will come
to understand. The franchise is one which easily admits of a simulated
qualification. It depends on the value of land,--and who is to value it?
If one Kafir were now to swear that he paid another Kafir 10s. a week
and fed him; no registrar would perhaps believe the oath. But it will
not be long before such oath might probably be true, or at any rate
impossible of rejection. The Registrar may himself be a Kafir,--as may
also be the member of Parliament. We have only to look at the Southern
States of the American Union to see how quickly the thing may run when
once it shall have begun to move. With two million and a quarter of
coloured people as against 340,000 white, all endowed with equal
political privileges, why should we not have a Kafir Prime Minister at
Capetown, and a Kafir Parliament refusing to pay salary to any but a
Kafir Governor?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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