Career
In his youth, Stigant served with the Cape Town Artillery, in the frontier wars. Responsible Government Stigant represented Cape Town in the, where he was a fierce conservative - opposing any further democratic independence from Britain. His conservative party was led by fellow MPs such as Manuel (representing the Cape Division), Barry, Clough, Fairbridge, and John X Merriman (then a conservative, but later to be a great liberal leader).
In 1871 the "responsibles" triumphed and Stigant spend much of the rest of the decade more involved in local council elections.
Confederation wars As a soldier, Stigant saw himself as qualified to advise on such policies. He also warned against the Confederation plan generally, stating that the Black African nations were perfectly aware that it was a plan to encircle and annex their remaining lands.
He then predicted that the slow-moving imperial troop columns would perform disastrously in the rough African terrain. Altogether, in spite of being a conservative imperialist himself, he joined a large group of local leaders who implored Frere to rethink his policies.
Stigant went on to become on three separate occasions (1871-1872, 1874-1875, 1884-1885).
The party that called itself the "Clean Party", was comprised predominantly of recent immigrant English merchants and businessmen, who favoured a cleaner city with greater infrastructure to encourage investment. (With Stigant, they were led by William Fleming, WM Farmer, H Bolus, JL Brown and Arkansas McKenzie) They had the support of the Cape Times and Lantern newspapers. They opposed the party of the ratepayers association, which they dubbed the "Dirty Party", which was comprised predominantly of Malay, Coloured and Afrikaner residents and both small & large property owners.
They were less afraid of the dirty streets than of being pushed out of areas of the city by the higher rates which would be needed in order to pay for the proposed new infrastructure.
(They were led by January Christiaan Hofmeyr, MJ Louw and Alwyn Zoutendyk) Specific controversies In early 1879 he was involved in a legal case with the Mayor at the time (Stigant vs Hofmeyr) due to his accusation of electoral fraud against the Mayor, and his subsequent being sued for libel. (He was found guiltless of libel although the fraud accusation turned out to be baseless) After attempting to persuade Burns to conform to the city wide policies, Stigant eventually relented, and was widely seen as having lost the debate.
