abroad he had undertaken at his own expense, and from which the city and its inhabitants benefited. The renewal and improvements he started in his term, and which were continued while he remained an ordinary councillor, were based on a sound financial policy. That way the support of voters and improved service delivery were ensured. His term of office can undoubtedly serve as an excellent example at municipal level in the “new South Africa”, where corruption, nepotism, tender irregularities, bureaucratic incompetence, squandering of money and greed were rampant early in the 21st century.
When Graaff stepped down as mayor in 1892, he was succeeded by Johan Mocke. Three members of the Afrikaner Bond – Graaff, his predecessor, D.C. de Waal, and his successor, Mocke, served consecutively as mayors of Cape Town.28
The power-supply project was taken further after Graaff’s mayoral term. The first cables for electrification were laid in January 1894 and Siemens & Halske completed the work in 15 months.29 When the network in Cape Town was finally completed in 1895, it was regarded as a triumph for Graaff. At the proposal of the council’s public works committee, the first power exchange was named after him. It was also proposed that a commemorative plaque in honour of Graaff be put up at the building, as it was mostly thanks to him that the city got electric lights.30 The writer Lawrence Green pointed out that Graaff had tried for years to convince the city council to illuminate the streets by means of electricity. Earlier there were gaslights, after the opening of the first gas works in 1845.31
Graaff Electrical Lighting Works was opened on 13 April 1895 by Mayor George Smart. According to a commemorative plaque still attached to the building, now a historic monument next to the Molteno Reservoir in Oranjezicht,32 the same night in the city hall in Greenmarket Square the mayoress switched on the first electric streetlights in Cape Town. A total of 775 poles had been planted throughout the city and Three Anchor Bay for the street lights, which illuminated the city all of a sudden.33
The new power exchange was built at a cost of £75 000. On the opening night Mayor Smart christened it by breaking open a bottle of champagne against one of the turbines, driven by steam or water. One of the guests looking on with a jaundiced eye was the mayor of “dark and distant Durban”.
Afterwards everybody left for the city hall, where the police and firefighters kept the crowds at bay. When the lights were switched on at 7.30, the square was brightly lit, an orchestra played the “Old Hundredth” and on an electric screen on the balcony of the city hall the words “Graaff Electrical Lighting Works” appeared.
Mayor Smart addressed the excited crowd: “One street light is worth three policemen. Electricity has not come one hour earlier than necessary. It will bring about a very great improvement in the moral atmosphere of the city and afford protection to property. Our works are equal to any in the world.” The Cape Argus underlined his view: “Cape Town is ahead of many towns in Britain in adopting this mysterious force, the electric fluid.”34
Smart said neither Graaff nor the city council could lay claim to Graaff’s having come up with the idea first. Others, including councillors Thomas O’Reilly and John Woodhead (after whom the Woodhead Reservoir on Table Mountain was named), had lobbied for it, but after the council had approved it, Graaff worked wholeheartedly to execute it.
Apart from the engineers’ fees, the work had not cost the council anything, since Graaff had borne the cost himself.35 That was what he termed real patriotism, Smart declared.
To loud applause, Graaff got his turn to speak and said he believed Smart was overestimating the work he had done with regard to the electric lights. Without the help of the many councillors who had supported him, electric lights would not have become a reality in Cape Town. Moreover, he had only performed his civic duty and that gave him great pleasure.36
CHAPTER 8
Member of Parliament
When Graaff was sworn in as member of the upper house of the Cape Parliament, the Legislative Council, on 2 June 1892, Cecil John Rhodes was prime minister. Rhodes, the imperial colossus who took over the government in July 1890 after the fall of the Sprigg ministry, was in an enormously powerful position as the wealthiest man in the country and in control of the largest province, the Cape Colony.
By this time the Cape Colony had been granted responsible government, a form of self-rule that came into force in 1872, after it had had a representative government since 1853. Although a few important amendments were made, the constitution of 1853 remained valid in the Cape Colony until 1910, characterised by parliamentary government with ministerial responsibility.
The year 1853 marked the beginning of parliamentary democracy in the Cape Colony – a tradition that was also established at around that time in the other three provinces of what would become the Union of South Africa, namely Natal, Transvaal and the Free State. For once, all three were ruled by republican forms of government: Natalia, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek and the Orange Free State.
The two most obvious characteristics of the Cape Parliament, which concerned itself with many issues apart from the mere local colonial activities, were an elected upper house and a colour-blind franchise.1 Membership of the two houses of the Cape Parliament was not restricted by skin colour at all, unlike under apartheid. There was a universal franchise for both the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly: all British citizens of age in the Cape Colony could vote, as long as they could write their name, address and occupation, lived in a building worth at least £75 and earned wages of £50 per annum. In practice, the franchise qualifications were applied in such a way that coloured and black people were to all intents and purposes excluded from standing as candidates, and until 1910 no brown or black person was elected as a Member of the Cape Parliament.2
The Legislative Council comprised 21 elected members, who served a seven-year term, three each from the seven circles into which the colony was divided. Members had to be enfranchised citizens, at least 30 years old, and own unencumbered property to the value of at least £2 000 or fixed and/or movable property of at least £4 000.
Despite the policy of anglification of the British authorities, English was no longer the only official language in the Cape Parliament. Hofmeyr succeeded in 1882 in gaining recognition for Dutch as a second official language in Parliament. In this he was supported, among others, by Rhodes, who actively campaigned for support from the Afrikaner Bond in an effort to achieve his goal, the expansion of the British Empire across the whole of Africa. Rhodes, who had developed a firm friendship with Hofmeyr and other Afrikaners, contended during that time that he, like Hofmeyr, desired to have the imperial factor eliminated from South Africa. He also registered his diamond giant, De Beers, in Cape Town. Therefore, he was regarded by some as a Cape colonial imperialist rather than a British imperialist.
Like Hofmeyr and the other members of the Afrikaner Bond, Graaff initially co-operated well with Rhodes. When Rhodes became premier, he appointed to his ministry all the capable men in Parliament, with the exception of Gordon Sprigg and Hofmeyr, who had since 1881 constantly refused to accept a cabinet portfolio. Hofmeyr was regarded as the power behind the throne, a role that earned him the nickname “The Mole” in politics.3 There was not much of an opposition at that stage, since the Afrikaner Bond had become such a comprehensive movement that acted on behalf of all colonists that no other party could be formed that would be fundamentally different.4
Rhodes required the support of the Afrikaner Bond for his plans to expand to the north, to the Zambezi and beyond. On the same day that he received a royal charter for the establishment of the British South Africa Company, 29 October 1889, he signed an agreement with the Cape government for the construction of a railway from Kimberley to Vryburg.5 The railway, a precondition for the founding of the BSA (the Charter Company), enabled him to reach the Zambezi through Bechuanaland (Botswana). That way the Transvaal Republic was circumvented, where suspicion of the Cape Colony
