Marico (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

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 Transvaal Colony, and its predecessor the South African Republic, the vote was restricted to white men, and as such, elections in the Transvaal 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]

Like most of the rural Transvaal, Marico had a largely Afrikaans-speaking electorate. In its early years, it was a marginal seat with a slight lean towards the South African Party, whose leader Jan Smuts was popular in the Transvaal. Its first MP, Lodewijk Arnoldus Slabbert Lemmer, stood down in 1924, and at that election the seat was won by Johannes Jacobus Pienaar for the National Party. Pienaar followed J. B. M. Hertzog into the United Party in 1934, and held his seat in 1938, but left parliament shortly after the election. The resulting by-election was won by Reformed Church minister Charl Wynand Markelbach du Toit for the Purified National Party, the faction of the NP that had rejected the UP merger. From that point on, Marico was a Nationalist seat, though not a truly safe one until the UP decline of the 1950s. It was abolished in 1981, at which point most of it became part of the Lichtenburg constituency.