"South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people." The line comes in the first sentence of the Freedom Charter, adopted by the Congress of the People at Kliptown in June 1955 and later carried into government by the African National Congress.
The ANC is now counting the cost of its worst election since it took power. In last week's local elections it fell to roughly 31 per cent nationally, against about 46 per cent in the 2021 local vote, and the Democratic Alliance came close behind on about 25. Hung councils are the rule rather than the exception, and Johannesburg and Pretoria are among the cities where the deals now being struck will decide who governs. Commentators have been reaching for the obvious comparison, the end of a long era of one-party dominance. South Africa has been through that once before, in 1948, and the way it happened is worth going over, because almost nobody saw it coming and the consequences lasted nearly half a century.
The old general goes to the country
In May 1948 the prime minister was Jan Smuts. He had fought the British as a Boer commander, then served them as a field marshal in two world wars, helped draft the preamble to the United Nations Charter, and had led the government since 1939. He was 78. His United Party, formed in 1934 by the fusion of his followers with those of J. B. M. Hertzog, held a comfortable majority, and very few people in Pretoria or London thought he could lose.
The opposition was the Herenigde Nasionale Party, the Reunited National Party, led by Daniel François Malan, a former Dutch Reformed minister and newspaper editor. Malan had made an electoral pact with the small Afrikaner Party of N. C. Havenga, the remnant of Hertzog's old supporters. Their campaign ran on a word that most English-speaking voters had barely heard: apartheid.
The voters themselves were almost all white. Coloured men in the Cape were still on the common roll, and African voters in the Cape could elect three white "native representatives", but that was the full extent of it.
How 49 per cent lost to 41
The polls closed on 26 May 1948. When the count was finished, Smuts's United Party had 524,230 votes, a little over 49 per cent. Malan's party had 401,834 and the Afrikaner Party 41,885, which together came to under 42 per cent.
The seats went the other way. The Nationalists won 70 and the Afrikaner Party 9, a total of 79. The United Party won 65 and its Labour allies 6, which made 71. Malan had a working majority of five, and he took it.
The explanation was written into the Union's constitution. The South Africa Act of 1909 allowed constituencies to vary by up to 15 per cent above or below the average, and the boundary commissions used that freedom to give rural seats fewer voters than urban ones. A rural seat could therefore hold some 30 per cent fewer voters than a city one. The countryside was Afrikaner and Nationalist; the cities leaned to Smuts. On the usual estimate, a United Party seat cost over 9,000 votes and a Nationalist one about 5,600. Count the votes evenly and Smuts would have stayed in office comfortably.
He did not even keep his own seat. Standerton, which he had represented for years, went to a Nationalist challenger. He stayed on as leader of his party, but he never governed again, and he died in September 1950.
A coalition of 79
The new government was a coalition, a word that sounds familiar this week. It was also a fragile one on paper. Havenga's nine seats were the margin, and Havenga had his own ideas, particularly about how fast to move against the coloured vote in the Cape. The two parties needed each other, and in 1951 they settled the matter by merging under the old name, the National Party.
What they built in the meantime came quickly. The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act came in 1949. The Population Registration Act and the Group Areas Act followed in 1950. The attempt to strip coloured voters from the common roll set off a constitutional fight with the courts that the government eventually won in 1956 by enlarging the Senate and packing the appeal court. None of this was hidden. Most of it had been set out in the report of the party's own Sauer Commission in 1947, before a single vote was cast.
It is sometimes said that Malan greeted the result by declaring that South Africa belonged to the Afrikaners once again. Versions of the line turn up in many histories, and I have never found a reliable record of exactly when he said it or in which words, so I treat it as what his supporters felt rather than as a quotation.
The ANC's answer
The ANC in 1948 was 36 years old and, by the standards of its own later history, cautious. It petitioned, it sent deputations and it was largely ignored. The election changed that. Its Youth League, whose leaders included Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, pushed through a Programme of Action at the party's conference in Bloemfontein in December 1949, calling for boycotts, strikes and civil disobedience. The Defiance Campaign against the new laws followed in 1952. The Freedom Charter quoted at the top of this piece came three years later, written as a direct reply to the state that the 1948 election had made.
The National Party, the minority winner of 1948, stayed in power for 46 years. In 1994 the ANC replaced it with 62.6 per cent of the vote in the country's first election open to everyone.
Where the comparison stops
The parallel with this month only goes so far. The ANC has not lost power nationally, and since 2024, when it fell to about 40 per cent in the general election, it has governed in a coalition with the Democratic Alliance that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. Local councils are not parliament, and nobody is campaigning on anything like the programme Malan's party carried in 1948.
Still, 1948 is a good warning about how little a lead in votes is worth once seats have to be stitched together. Smuts had more votes than anyone, and one small ally with six seats. Malan had fewer votes and the ally he needed. My own view is that the ANC is closer to Smuts's position than it would like to admit, and that Johannesburg will go to whichever party finds its Havenga first.
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