BALLINGER, MARGARET (née Hodgson)
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Violet Margaret Livingstone Ballinger (1894- 1980), née Hodgson, was an outspoken advocate of African rights, represented Africans in the South African Parliament, and was a founder of the South African Liberal Party.
PHOTO CAPTION: Margaret Ballinger. SOURCE: Wits Univeristy.
She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and emigrated to South Africa at age 10. She was educated in South Africa and at Oxford. From 1921 to 1938 she was a senior lecturer in history at the University of the Witwatersrand. With the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the constitution denied Africans voting rights except in the Cape Colony. A constitutional clause required a two-thirds vote of both houses of Parliament sitting together to reduce these rights.
In 1934-35 the United Party led by J.B.M. Hertzog, and with the collaboration of Jan Smuts, passed the “Representation of Natives Act, which removed Africans from the common voting rolls and assigned them a limited form of separate representation. The African National Congress asked Ballinger to stand for one of the four seats designated to protect African interests. She was first elected to parliament from the Eastern Cape in 1937 and, reelected five times, served until 1959.
Both she and her husband were well-known activists in South Africa. Her husband, W.G. Ballinger, was a Scottish labour organiser who had come to South Africa to assist Clements Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU).
In 1953, Margaret Ballinger and other prominent South Africans broke away from the United Party because of its position on racial issues and formed the Liberal Party. Ballinger became the first president of the party and was its only member in Parliament. In 1968, when the government outlawed interracial political parties, the party dissolved itself.
She retired from politics in 1959 when her parliamentary seat was abolished by the Bantu Self-Government Act of the same year. In 1968, she published her major historical analysis, From Union to Apartheid: A Trek to Isolation.
VIRGINIA CURTIN KNIGHT
