Six months pregnant, Elizabeth Kganyo was determined to cast her vote, even if it meant standing in a sun-baked queue for hours on end. “I was so excited because it was the first time,” she recalls, sitting on an upturned plastic basket outside her shack in Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg. “Everybody wanted to vote. Everybody was happy.”
South Africa held its first multiracial election 20 years ago on Sunday, defying bombs, bluster and the threat of civil war to conjure a spectacle of voters in long, winding lines that ravished the world. But for Kganyo, like millions of others who put a cross beside the face of Nelson Mandela, those days of miracles and wonder are a fading memory. “It’s not the same now. We’re not happy to vote any more. It’s not like the first time.”
Next month, South Africans return to the polls for the first election since Mandela’s death and the first in which the so-called “born free” generation – those whose lives began after racial apartheid – are eligible to vote. The African National Congress is in no doubt of a fifth consecutive victory on 7 May but faces an unprecedented long-term challenge both on the streets and at the ballot box.
Two decades of modest economic growth have left the white minority better off than ever but half of young black people without a job. South Africa is one of the most unequal societies on Earth and reaping a whirlwind of frustration and unrest. One expression of this is in tyre-burning, stone-throwing township protests that could point towards future social instability. Another is the rise of a militant new party that claims to be the true inheritor of the ANC’s radical legacy.
The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is bringing a flavour of Latin American socialism to an otherwise somewhat sterile election. It draws thousands of people to its rallies wearing an instantly recognisable motif, a red beret, as sported by the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. Indeed, its “commander in chief”, charismatic firebrand Julius Malema, travelled to both Venezuela and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe to hone his populist, anti-western rhetoric….
South Africa Today – South Africa News
