Which is SA's oldest political party?

It’s a no-brainer, surely? The ANC was founded as long ago as 1912, making it today by some way the country’s oldest extant political party. The old National Party could at least claim to be close to that status, having set out as a breakaway from the ruling South African Party in 1913, but even then the ANC led by a short head. With the NP having long since squeaked its last miserable squeak, no current political grouping would seem to be anywhere close to matching the ANC’s venerable old age.

Actually, a closer look at the unfolding saga of parliamentary politics in South Africa over the last century, with its various splits, amalgamations and name changes, reveals something rather interesting. Certainly, the ANC is by far the oldest still active political grouping that has retained its distinct identity and name throughout its existence (well, almost: it was originally called the South African National Native Congress). However, tracing the history of the official opposition Democratic Alliance back through its various incarnations reveals that its genesis actually predates that of the ANC by two years.

In brief, this is how the story unfolded: in the inaugural South African elections following unification in 1910, the South African Party came out on top, remaining in power until 1924 when it lost to a National-Labour coalition. Five years later, the SAP and NP merged to form the United Party. This survived a subsequent breakaway by a disgruntled Nationalist faction to remain in office until the infamous elections of 1948, when the aforementioned faction unexpectedly snatched the spoils. Now in opposition, the UP went into steady decline, losing ground at virtually every election. Long before its eventual dissolution, it had survived a defection by some of its more liberal MPs, who in 1959 hived off to form the Progressive Party (interestingly, the ANC also underwent a split that year, resulting in the formation of the Pan-African Congress).

The Progressive Party was almost wiped out in the 1961 elections, but retained a toehold in Parliament through Helen Suzman’s holding on to her Houghton seat. For the next thirteen years, Suzman famously played a lone role on her party’s behalf in the House of Assembly until, finally, the 1974 elections returned seven Progressive MPs.

By then, the United Party had all but reached the end of the line, and its demise followed shortly afterwards. First, a number of its more progressive members left to form the Reform Party, which thereafter merged with the PP to form the short-lived Progressive Reform Party. After further UP defections, this became the Progressive Federal Party, which emerged as the official opposition in the 1977 elections. The New Republic Party, which essentially sought to continue the legacy of the now defunct UP, came in third.

The PFP retained its position as official opposition for the next ten years, but even an alliance with the NRP — or what was left of it — could not prevent it from being beaten into third place by the Conservative Party in 1987. By this time, the once impregnable National Party was in serious disarray. In 1989, it shed considerable support to both left and right and only narrowly retained its overall majority. In this, the last all-white election, the progressive cause was represented by the Democratic Party, founded shortly before than through the merging of the PFP with two offshoots of the NP founded by verligte NP dissidents (remember Denis Worrall and Wynand Malan?).

The DP lasted for just over a decade, surviving a disastrous performance in the country’s inaugural non-racial elections in 1994 and triumphantly wresting official opposition status from the doomed New National Party five years later. Then followed the creation of the Democratic Alliance following a merger with the NNP and Louis Luyt’s small and now forgotten Federal Alliance. The name was retained even after the NNP broke away to go it alone barely a year later. The DA went on to strengthen its official opposition status, nearly doubling its overall support in the two elections that followed.

There you have it, then: The roots of today’s DA stretch back all the way to 1910, which means that it can claim to be just one year short of its century and marginally older than its ANC rival. Of course, it is a vastly different organisation from its SAP ancestor, but that is to be expected.

One possible objection that might be raised is that the ANC did not emerge ex nihilo in 1912 but was, as Wikipedia puts it “predated by a number of black lumpenproletariat resistance movements, among them Umkosi Wezintaba, formed in South Africa between 1890 and 1920”. To that, it can be rejoined that the South African Party also comprised political organisations that were active on a regional level prior to 1910. Also, it could be argued that South Africa did not really exist, except as a general geographical expression, before the 1910 unification of what were then four distinct colonial entities.

I close with a piece of party political trivia, which I put as a challenge to this blog’s readership. The original South African Party was in existence for just under twenty years (1910-1929) but later two other parties by that name were founded, and contested at least one election each. Which were they, and when were they in existence.

Some of you might get one — I’ll be surprised and impressed if anyone can identify both!