Desmond Latham

As South Africa goes to the polls in local government elections, Americans are lining up for their mid-terms. A number of significant political events have taken place around elections cycles recently.

Israel, Serbia, Brazil, Russia.

Of course, for denizens of planet earth, the American mid-terms are far more important than South Africa’s local elections. However, the two countries appear to be inalienably linked in more than one way, despite the electoral system being totally different.

The History of South Africa series is up to episode 299, the year 1890. In terms of elections, there were four different systems at once at this time.

• Cape Colony: a British colony with a representative legislature from 1853 (elected Legislative Council and House of Assembly) and responsible government from 1872, so the Prime Minister came from the legislature, as in Britain. Rhodes won the Barkly West seat in 1880 and became PM in 1890.
• Natal: representative government from 1856 and responsible government in 1893, with a franchise that was nominally colour-blind but effectively almost all white.
• Transvaal (ZAR) and Orange Free State: republics where the white male burghers elected a Volksraad (legislature) and, separately, a president for a fixed term. Kruger was repeatedly re-elected, in 1883, 1888, 1893 and 1898.
• Griqualand West/Kimberley: diamond-field politics before incorporation into the Cape, a boom-town electorate of diggers and speculators.

The US before 1900

• Federal elections for the presidency (via the Electoral College), the House every two years, and state legislatures.
• Senators were chosen by state legislatures until the 17th Amendment (1913), a point that makes the era’s money-in-politics stories make sense.
• Local and state elections ran on a mass two-party system, with the Democrats and Republicans fully organised nationally.

Technical differences

Label	Cape Colony	Boer republics	United States
Franchise basis	Property or income qualification for men, no formal racial bar (1853)	White male burghers only	Varied by state; white men near-universal by mid-century
Racial rules	Colour-blind in law, narrowed in practice from the 1880s	Explicitly white	15th Amendment (1870) barred racial exclusion, then evaded after Reconstruction
Executive	Governor, then PM from the legislature	President elected by burghers	President via Electoral College
Parties	Loose factions plus the Afrikaner Bond	Personal and regional politics	Mass national parties and urban machines
Voting method	Secret ballot only from c.1892	Largely public and local	Party-printed ballots until Australian ballot spread in the late 1880s–1890s
Women	Excluded	Excluded	Excluded federally, with exceptions in some western states (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho)

• The Cape’s franchise was the key unusual feature. Property qualifications of about £25 applied regardless of race, which is why a minority of African and coloured men could vote, and in some eastern constituencies they mattered.
• The Cape narrowed it deliberately. Changes in 1887, 1892 and the Glen Grey Act of 1894 raised qualifications, added literacy tests and excluded communal-tenure land, which all cut African voters.
• Natal went further. Africans had to be exempted from customary law to qualify, so almost none did, and the 1896 act targeted Indian voters, drawing Gandhi into his first political campaign.
• The Uitlander question was the Transvaal’s crucial franchise dispute. Foreign miners who made up much of the Rand population faced long residency requirements, 14 years under the 1890 law, which became a pretext for the Jameson Raid and ultimately the war.
• The US had no central election machinery. The Constitution left rules to states, so each ran its own, which produced both innovation and abuse. Party workers handed out colourful ballots (“tickets”) at the polls, voters deposited them publicly, and vote-buying was a recognised industry. The Australian ballot (state-printed, secret) reformed that from 1888.

Both societies were expanding settler frontier, driven by displacement of indigenous populations and the legal conversion of land into individual title.

Dismantling Communal Tenure in the US and the Cape

There is a striking parallel between the two. The US Dawes Act of 1887 allotted tribal land to individuals, and the Cape’s Glen Grey Act of 1894 pushed individual tenure and labour taxes on Africans. Both were presented as civilising reform while breaking up communal land and, in the Cape’s case, cutting the voter franchise. Both involved wars against indigenous peoples, the Xhosa frontier wars, the Anglo-Zulu war, (and a host of others as we know), while in the US the Plains Wars were fought over land and legislation followed.

American reformers believed that Native American communal landholding or the reservation system kept tribes in a state of savagery. Senator Henry Dawes famously argued that to be civilized meant to have “your own home and stake in the soil.”

Cecil Rhodes and his contemporaries viewed African communal tenure as backward and inefficient. Rhodes explicitly stated that the Glen Grey Act was designed to give Africans “a Glen Grey system… a stimulus to work” by forcing them out of traditional pastoralism.

In America, tribal lands were surveyed and broken up into 160-acre plots for heads of families. Crucially, any surplus land remaining after allotment was declared open for white homesteaders and corporate speculators—resulting in the loss of tens of millions of acres of Native land. Furthermore, allottees were subjected to a 25-year trust period before they could legally own the land, but states quickly began taxing those lands, leading to massive tax foreclosures.

The Glen Grey Act limited African landholding to individual, un-subdividable quitrent titles (typically around 4 acres) to prevent land accumulation. To ensure families couldn’t live off the land alone, Rhodes introduced a labour tax (ten shillings) on every able-bodied man living in the district who did not go out to work for wages for a certain period each year. If you couldn’t pay in cash, you had to work—effectively forcing Xhosa men off their plots and into the diamond mines of Kimberley or the farms of the Cape.

Gold, diamonds and resources

In California 91849), the Comstock silver lode, the Black Hills (1874-76) and the Klondike (1896) in the US, set against the Kimberley diamonds (1867-71) and the Witwatersrand gold fields (1886) meant that prospectors and even investors traversed the Atlantic to work on these finds.

Politically, the US 1896 campaign was fought over gold versus silver, while South African gold underpinned the global gold standard. It was the gold fields that finally prompted the British government to go to war against the Transvaal — with mine owners predominantly British based and demanding action.

Railways and Infrastructure development echoes too.

The US transcontinental railroad (1869) and the railway barons’ influence on politics, including the major scandal of the time, the Crédit Mobilier scandal (1872-73) resonated in South Africa where the Cape dominated railway building. The Cape Town to Kimberley line was completed in 1885, and to Johannesburg, 1892. In America, the dream was to link east to west, in South Africa, Rhodes and the British wanted to link south to north.

Railway rates and concessions were a political issue in both places. Kruger’s Netherlands-South African Railway company clashed with Cape interests over the lucrative Rand traffic.

Money, media and machine politics

In 1896, Cleveland businessman Mark Hanna’s corporate fundraising for William McKinley, and Rhodes’ buying into the Cape Argus and funding allies, showed that business interests and media interests shaped elections.

Hanna owned coal, iron, shipping and banking interests, and he managed McKinley’s campaign and chaired the Republican National Committee. Hanna systematised corporate fundraising by approaching banks and corporations and, by most accounts, asking for contributions scaled to their size. The Republican war chest is usually put at around $3.5 million, with some estimates running far higher, against a few hundred thousand for the Democrats’ Bryan campaign.

The money paid for a mass literature operation (millions of pamphlets, including in German and other immigrant languages), speakers, and the front porch campaign that brought delegations to McKinley’s Ohio home. The pitch was framed as protecting sound money which was the gold standard against silver, so business donors had a clear policy stake. Hanna was later appointed to the US Senate (1897) by Ohio’s legislature, with allegations of vote-buying.

Most major papers backed McKinley, while William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal backed Bryan, an unusual position for a wealthy publisher.

Cecil Rhodes’ money moved through several channels: his stake in the Cape Argus, support for political allies, his 1888 donation of £10,000 to Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party in the hope of favourable colonial attitudes, and his arrangement with Hofmeyr’s Afrikaner Bond carried him to the premiership in 1890.

Funding the Jameson Raid in 1895–96 was the most extreme case of a businessman using private resources for a political outcome. The pro-war press in 1899 is the parallel to 1898 in America, with the mining houses Randlords pressing the Uitlander case. J.A. Hobson, a journalist, went to South Africa and argued in 1900 that the war served financial interests, and his Imperialism (1902) is the classic critique.

Patronage spoils in the US, reformed partly by the Pendleton Act, parallels the networks in favour around concessions in the Cape and Transvaal.

Governments granted monopoly rights rather than jobs: Kruger’s dynamite monopoly (1888), the railway concession, liquor and other franchises. These were resented by the mining houses and ran through the uitlander grievances. In the Cape, the Rudd Concession (1888) from Lobengula became the foundation for the Chartered Company, concession-as-empire.

But when it came to early attempts to deal with these complications, it was the Americans who took action first. The US response came in stages: Pendleton (1883), the Australian ballot (late 1880s), the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), and eventually the 17th Amendment (1913), partly prompted by scandals such as the 1899 Montana bribery case involving William A. Clark.

No comparable reform of concession politics arrived in the Cape or Transvaal before the war, and the Boer War (1899–1902) overtook the question. In America, the Trump administration has reintroduced concession politics with apparent ease.

Race and the franchise, tightening in the 1890s

In the US, Mississippi’s 1890 constitution began the southern disenfranchisement wave (poll taxes, literacy tests, later grandfather clauses), while the Cape’s 1892 and 1894 measures tightened its own franchise in the same decade. The same trend, in two systems, pointed the same way. Long after slavery had been abolished in the Cape, and fought over in the American Civil War, race was back on the books.

As the Trump goes after immigrants as part of his American First agenda, it’s useful to remember the past. Many US states let non-citizens immigrants vote after declaring their intention to nationalise all the way through to the 1920s. Things have certainly changed.

But one major contradiction here was over immigration. The Transvaal refused its immigrants, the uitlanders, the right to vote which was also one of the main causes of the Anglo-Boer war.

As citizens of the two nations prepare to cast their ballots in the first week of November 2026, the echoes of the past reverberate once more.