"...considerably more hesitancy in Cape Town. It had been under a Conservative government in 1877 that the attempted Carnarvon Plan had been pursued at the behest of the Colonial Office to amalgamate South Africa into a single entity combining the English settler colonies at the Cape and Natal with Native kingdoms and the Boer States, an enterprise that had ended in disaster and fomented mistrust between the region's [1] polities for decades to come. So it was with more than a little trepidation that the Malcolm-Jagow Convention, signed in Hamburg between the British and German governments without input from the Parliament of South Africa, was received by local leaders, who saw in its contours the long shadow of similar schemes hatched in London forty years earlier.
The geopolitical situation was thus badly scrambled. The Free Republics were now hemmed in on both sides on the map by British red both to their southwest and now to their north; despite Oostburg's booming growth, British possession of Lourenco Marques directly threatened Boer access to the sea and placed a level of dependency on British commerce that had not been there before. The Germanophile governments of the Free Republics had long suspected that Portugal's hold on Mozambique was waning, but had held out hope that an alliance of Germany and the Netherlands would impress upon the British the need to preserve the independence and dignity of the Boers; Berlin's eagerness to split Portuguese Austral-Africa in half with Britain and leave Pretoria and Bloemfontein out to dry in the process put paid to such ideas. It was thus generally assumed, after two decades of improving relations even despite the occasional bellicosity from Joseph Chamberlain, that the next part of the plan for Britain was to absorb Basutoland, Swatiland and Zululand and then force the Boers into a confederation of states stretching from Mombasa in the north all the way to the Cape which would inevitably be dominated by culturally and politically Anglophile settlers.
Ironically, the constituency most in favor of this process were the Cape Dutch, who were increasingly outnumbered demographically thanks both to large-scale immigration (especially from Britain's West Country, Cornwall, and Wales) and the increasing outmigration of poorer Cape Dutch into the interior to work in the booming goldfields of the Witwatersrand. [2] The common view amongst many of the Afrikaner Bond's most outspoken members was that only by uniting with the Boers of further inland, rather than simply following them on a Little Trek via railroad to flee English cultural hegemony, would the Afrikaner culture thrive and be able to dominate the whole of southern Africa. [3] Thus it was that SAP, as well as the declining conservative Progressive Party that had started losing steam with the deaths of its chief ideologue, Thomas Scanlen, and chief financier, fruit baron Cecil Rhodes, became as leery in 1916 of "Unionism" as their forebears had been in 1877 of similar ideas; put simply, the liberal Merriman government based in trade-dependent and urbane Cape Town had little interest in subsuming its interests (and, perhaps in less noble terms, those of its English-speaking constituents) to Pretoria and what a great many thought were outright theocratic Dutch Reformed farmers and burghers with little care for the affairs of the Cape.
The elections of 1916 thus occurred under this cloud, with the SAP winning a reduced majority, but a majority nonetheless, on this platform of total opposition to "further Union." The Afrikaner Bond emerged as the chief opposition party as anti-Union Progressives flocked to the SAP out of fears of splitting the vote, and the first independent socialist politicians who would eventually form the South Africa Labor Party entered Parliament for the first time. The elections revealed a restive South Africa, one that was staunchly imperial in its outlook but firmly committed to the longstanding principles of local rule, and while proud of London for its new territories were uninterested, once again, in seeing their country be used as a tool in the Colonial Office's world games; it also revealed a Cape Dutch community that increasingly identified its interests on ethnic, rather than regional, terms, an ominous sign for social harmony.
Merriman retired in June of 1916, not long after the successful polls, shortly before his 75th birthday, having governed South Africa for over a decade. His replacement would be James Molteno, son of former Prime Minister John, and it was the younger scion of the Molteno family who would user in with his new majority what is today referred to as the "South African Model." Merriman had been a staunch opponent of women's suffrage and an alteration of the qualified franchise that set a property requirement of fifty pounds since 1899 under John Sprigg; the party's grassroots had shifted against both of these policies, however, and Molteno followed them, in late 1916 following Australia in granting women the vote across the land while reducing the qualified franchise to thirty pounds, allowing tens of thousands of additional voters onto the rolls and making the country's democracy far more universal. Of course, there were cynical political reasons for this, too; women were thought of as being even anti-Unionist than most men (though less so among the Cape Dutch) and it was widely assumed that the thousands of Natives allowed onto the rolls with the reduced property qualifications would support the SAP to avoid the threat of falling under Boer rule. The campaign for expanded suffrage, then, was the other side of the coin of the struggle against Unionism for Molteno's government..."
- Mosaic: The Endurance of South Africa
[1] I'm going to need a good name for the "greater South Africa" region since it's balkanized ITTL. "Transzambezia," maybe?
[2] And, it should be noted, much fewer of these British immigrants winding up in the Transvaal than OTL, thus making the Cape and Natal noticeably more British and the OFS/Transvaal noticeably more Afrikaner
[3] A view that inevitably won out over more moderate instincts in OTL