BALLINGER, WILLIAM GEORGE

William George Ballinger (1894-1974), a Scottish-born liberal, represented African voters in the South African Senate for 12 years and played a prominent role in liberal politics for more than four decades.

He studied at the University of Glasgow and Elsinore College in Denmark, and from 1922 to 1928 was active in local government and trade union affairs in Motherwell, Scotland. In 1928, he was recruited to go to South Africa as an advisor to the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), founded by Clements Kadalie, which was then in decline as a result of mismanagement.

Kadalie and Ballinger soon fell out, and Ballinger was unable to halt the ICU’s further division and disintegration. Ballinger took up journalism and research on poverty conditions among Africans, and helped to found an African co-operative society in the Transvaal. With other white liberals, he participated actively in the Joint Council movement which in the 1920s and 1930s tried to encourage dialogue between white and black community leaders.

In 1938, he made an unsuccessful bid for election to the South African Senate as a Natives representative, but his wife, Margaret, won a seat in the lower House representing Africans from the Eastern Cape. Ballinger was elected to the Senate in 1948 to represent Transvaal and Free State African voters, and served in that capacity until the Nationalist Party ended African parliamentary representation in 1960. Ballinger was a founder of the Liberal Party in 1943, and throughout his political career stood for the creation of a democratic common society in South Africa. Because he gave priority to wooing white public opinion, he favoured a qualified franchise, a position which put him at odds with the more radical wing of the Liberal Party.

GAIL M. GERHART