Bethal (House of Assembly of South Africa constituency)

Bethal
Former constituency for the South African House of Assembly
Location of Bethal within South Africa (1981)
Province	Transvaal
Electorate	18,092 (1989)
Former constituency
Created	1915
Abolished	1994
Number of members	1
Last MHA	C. D. de Jager (CP)
Replaced by	Mpumalanga

Bethal, known between 1948 and 1966 as Bethal-Middelburg, was a constituency in the Transvaal Province of South Africa, which existed from 1915 to 1994. Named after the town of Bethal, it covered a rural area in the eastern Transvaal. Throughout its existence it elected one member to the House of Assembly and one to the Transvaal Provincial Council.

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, Bethal 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. In 1929, it was briefly held by Tielman Roos for the National Party - however, he resigned the following year due to a health scare and the SAP retook the seat. They (and their successors the United Party) held it until 1948, at which Bethal was one of many rural seats to fall to the Herenigde Nasionale Party-led coalition. In Bethal's case, their new MP was elected for the allied Afrikaner Party, but joined the NP shortly thereafter, and the governing party would hold Bethal for the next forty years. In 1987, again like many other rural Transvaal seats, it fell to Andries Treurnicht's hardline Conservative Party, which held it until the end of apartheid.

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