The 1929 general elections were scheduled for June. As the first term of the Pact government drew to a close in the first half of 1929, the ‘black peril’ was high on the political agenda. The previous years had seen several attempts to curtail African political rights. In July 1926 Prime Minister Hertzog had tabled several bills aiming to reinforce African segregation and curtail their franchise rights. One, the Native Land Act Amendment Bill, aimed to decrease the amount of reserved land available to Africans as stipulated in the 1913 Land Act; another, the Representation of Natives in Parliament Bill, aimed to remove Africans in the Cape Province from the common voting roll. The bills were not passed, but they were a harbinger of things to come, and the ensuing debates provided the backdrop for the 1929 election.

The Communist Party was keen to campaign under its new Native Republic slogan. Africans and Coloureds in the Cape still had a qualified franchise, although only whites could represent them. This franchise was a legacy of the representative government that Britain had granted to the Cape Colony in 1853, when all male British subjects over the age of twenty-one who owned property in the form of land or buildings of a certain value or who received a certain annual income were given the right to vote, irrespective of colour. At its recent conference, the CPSA had decided to contest seats in the two constituencies where blacks constituted close to half the electorate.