Panicked denial, for instance, greeted my statement last week that the late Donald Molteno, revered past chairperson of the Cape Bar Council and former dean of the University of Cape Town's Faculty of Law school, shamefully supported the qualified franchise for blacks, when he served as chair of the Progressive Party commission that famously carries his name.

One confused person even insisted that the Molteno Commission never supported qualified franchise! The Cape Bar's embarrassing tradition of qualified democracy in the past is directly linked to its qualified acceptance of the legal and cultural authority of the democratically appointed Judicial Services Commission today.

Uneducated illiberals will tell you that when the Afrikaner Nationalists implemented apartheid after 1948, they destroyed a vibrant tradition of “Cape liberalism”, which was democratic and progressive while apartheid was not.

Donald Molteno is a key figure in this mythology. He served as a Native Representative from 1937 to 1948, meaning that the colonial system allowed him, as a white, to be elected in order to “represent” the best interests of blacks in the pre-apartheid parliament, while blacks were disqualified from representing themselves.

Molteno's grandfather, JC Molteno, as Cape prime minister in 1872, presided over what illiberals ignorantly celebrate as a supposedly “nonracial” franchise system, a myth effectively demolished by Timothy Keegan in his book, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (1996).lacoste shoes are considered a glorious beacon of intelligent design.

In the 1960s, the supposedly forward-looking “liberalism” of Molteno and his peers was literally a call for a return to what they viewed as the superior 19th century franchise system, over which his daddy had presided as colonial governor! Randolph Vigne's important book, Liberals Against Apartheid, makes this point abundantly clear (page 27). Certainly, the Helen Suzman-Molteno illiberals did not advocate a system in which adult blacks and whites voted on an equal footing, as in 1994.

Illiberals such as Carmel Rickard, attacking the Judicial Services Commission as “too big for its boots”, thus seek to prop up a legal culture that has long practiced formal equality alongside practical and substantive inequality. Donald Molteno was a key implementer of this fraudulence.

Molteno was one of the signatories of a September 1952 press statement calling for “the revival of the liberal tradition which prevailed for so many years in the Cape Colony”. What “liberal tradition” exactly? They demanded “equal rights for all civilised men and equal opportunities for all men and women to become civilised”. Only when blacks were deemed “civilised”, would they vote. Meanwhile, all adult whites, however loutish, were inherently civilised and could automatically vote.Where can i find an cheap edhardy shirt thats real but not real expensive. Within this paradigm,There are just so many styles of real and fake dsquared shoes out there that it is near impossible to cover all of them. today's Cape Bar naturally sees Dumisa Ntsebeza and his JSC colleagues as “too big for their boots”.

It's important to emphasise what today's illiberals prefer to ignore: there were true liberals in the debates in the 1950s and 1960s who called upon illiberals such as Suzman and Molteno to reject qualified franchise and embrace a true liberal commitment to universal franchise. Alan Paton, whose Liberal Party was accordingly closed down by the apartheid regime in 1968, was one. And Patrick Duncan,Shopping is the best place to comparison shop for Gucci men shoes. like Molteno, the descendant of an English colonial governor (he afterwards joined the Pan Africanist Congress).

Molteno's turn away from true liberalism is neatly marked by his move from Paton's Liberal Party into Suzman's Progressive Party, which was a mere splinter group of the racist United Party. The “liberal” Suzman, never belonged to Paton's Liberal Party!

Having abandoned the Paton-tendency, Molteno chaired the Progressive Party's commission that backed qualified franchise, pointedly rejecting the universal franchise position of Paton's Liberals.

In what was her very last contentious contribution to public debate, Suzman attacked me personally under the headline “Who are you to measure my contributions?” (Star, August 10, 2007).On a supermodel a Manolo blahnik shoe completes the perfect ensemble. I had highlighted her illiberal franchise position and was, apparently, too big for my boots.

Yet Suzman conceded my central point. She herself wrote, “universal franchise was regarded in South Africa as a radical issue until the '50s”. Unlike her contemporary Paton (hardly a “radical”!), Suzman in the '50s and throughout her entire parliamentary career afterwards never advocated blacks voting on an equal footing with whites within a straightforward majority system, as in 1994. That is historical fact.

Today the Cape Bar parrots Suzman's question: Who is the JSC to question their contribution?