page_title: Percy Molteno
section_title: Movement towards Union
hierarchical_section_title: Percy Molteno / Political career / Movement towards Union
caption_attribution_description: English: General Louis Botha. Afrikaans leader and South African politician.
context_page_description: Percy Alport Molteno was a Cape Colony-born lawyer, director of companies, politician and philanthropist who served as a Liberal Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1918.
context_section_description: Molteno entered the British House of Commons as the Member for Dumfriesshire in 1906, and soon used his increased parliamentary influence in the direction of the granting of full Responsible Government to the "ex-Republics" in southern Africa.
  He was deeply involved in the process leading up to the Union of South Africa in 1910. He was also the adviser and confidant of a number of leading South African statesmen during this process.
  Molteno saw the upcoming union as politically inevitable and not necessarily a bad thing. He had, after all, been advocating the ending of animosities between Briton and Boer for years. However, he was deeply concerned about the movement to unite the Afrikaners and British diaspora in a common policy of politically excluding the Black South Africans.
  Molteno had been acutely aware of the earliest beginnings of that tendency many years earlier, and it increasingly became his primary concern about the political future of South Africa. It also led him to intensify his support for the cause of black African nationalist movements, and activists such as John Tengo Jabavu. Jabavu was a political ally and old friend of his brothers, the Cape Members of Parliament John and James Molteno, and had worked with Percy from the time of the Boer War. Molteno was particularly involved in Jabavu's "Imvo Zabantsundu" newspaper, in which he also had shares, and decades later, when Jabavu's son wrote his father's biography, he dedicated it to their family friend as "...a token of thanks, for deeds of true friendship to the hero of this work."
  In addition, during this time he used his influence in both Africa & London to attack the pass laws in the Boer republics, their "brutal" labour laws, the practise of flogging, the morality act, discriminatory taxation (the hut tax), restricted land rights, martial law with its closing down of black African political publications, and the recommendations of the Native Affairs Commission.
  Molteno supported the extension of the Cape's multiracial "Cape Qualified Franchise" into a system of universal franchise across South Africa. It was widely known that it would inevitably result in black majority rule. 
  However, the political predicament on the eve of Union was that it course of action was supported only by a few white liberals and black politicians in the Cape, and the overwhelming majority of the predominantly-white electorate across Southern Africa was strongly opposed to that outcome. Besides, the British government was inclined to support the opposition.
  Thus, supporters of universal franchise, led by JW Sauer, Cape Prime Minister Merriman and Molteno himself, fought a losing battle, and General Louis Botha rode the wave of white public opinion to power by publicly opposing nonracial politics.
  A final compromise saved a weak form of qualified franchise but only in the liberal Cape. Molteno, who increasingly saw even the qualified franchise as insufficiently inclusive, called the compromise "pathetic" and predicted a worsening struggle over the issue of political rights. His later letters to Botha and Merriman (1914) warn of history repeating itself in "poor South Africa" and of approaching troubles to which he could see no end.
caption: General Louis Botha, Boer war hero and first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa.
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