member of the Australasian Study of Parliament Group (NSW Chapter).

It can well be argued that parliamentary democracy came to South Africa little more than a decade ago, when a parliamentary system based upon universal suffrage was established in a bicameral national parliament and in nine unicameral provincial assemblies. Whether or not the parliament of the new system was the dominant institution of the new democracy remains at issue. Assessing the nature of parliament’s relationship with executive power must involve an assessment of the political context that envelopes both, and in South Africa an important aspect of that context is the particular way that the party has bound executive and parliament-ary offices together. But when a party is as dominant as the ANC, questions about its internal democracy require even more attention than might needed in an older and more widely understood system of parliamentary government. It can well be argued that parliamentary democracy came to South Africa little more than a decade ago, when a parliamentary system based upon universal suffrage was established in a bicameral national parliament and in nine unicameral provincial assemblies. The original European parliament at the Cape was established in 1854 and resembled the other representative assemblies of the Empire at the time, but it had only a limited black suffrage. The later parliaments of the Boer republics did not have even that, and the tricameral parliament of 1985 was a notorious attempt to buy off the coloured and Indian (including the Asian) communities at the expense of the black, who were intended to have representation only in the ‘homelands’, prompting instead a mass boycott that presaged the fall of apartheid (Gordon an