The ceremony went virtually unnoticed. On a cloudy day in April, President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered a lackluster speech in South Africa's administrative capital, Pretoria, commemorating the end of white minority rule in South Africa. When Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the country's first black president, the air was sunny with hope. Thirty years later, Mr Ramaphosa's nervous performance against a bleak backdrop symbolized the decline. The African National Congress, Mr Ramaphosa's party, has been politically dominant since the country's first democratic vote in 1994. It could lose its parliamentary majority for the first time in Wednesday's general election.
This is unknown territory. On several occasions, former South African President Jacob Zuma proclaimed that the ANC would govern “until Jesus returns.” Now Mr Zuma is hoping to dethrone the party that made his infamous bribery possible. UMkhonto weSizwe, or MK, founded in December last year and named after the ANC's former military wing, has him as its face. Even though he has been disqualified from running The party has mobilized thousands of its supporters behind its populist platform to run for the country's highest court. If it can overcome its internal factional struggles and legal problems, it could pose one of the biggest risks to the ANC's vote share and force it into a coalition.
The rise of the party is one of many morbid symptoms in South Africa today. The ANC has been stripped of its purpose, a shadow of its former self, and the country it has long led is plagued by collapsing infrastructure, systemic corruption, declining central authority and violent crime. Thirty years after the end of apartheid, South Africa is in the midst of a new complex transformation. What comes next is unclear. But given the country's fragmentation, this is unlikely to be a good thing.
How did we get here? During his State of the Nation address in February, Mr Ramaphosa allegorized the country's post-apartheid trajectory through the fictional figure of Tintswalo, a woman born in 1994 who would stand to benefit from the deracialized expansion of social services such as education, housing , electricity and healthcare. As many have done pointed outThis democratic dividend persisted for at least the first fifteen years of South Africa's post-apartheid history, when economic growth was strong, international market conditions were favorable, and state management was competent.
The turning point came in 2009 – the year Zuma came to power and a year after the global financial crisis. What followed was an extensive decline in life chances, political expectations and economic prospects. The ANC's hegemony was shattered by a series of consensus-shattering episodes: the 2012 Marikana massacre, in which 34 miners were killed by police; the founding of the Economic Freedom Fighters in 2013 by a former ANC youth leader; the expulsion of the National Union of Metalworkers from the country's largest trade union federation, which is formally affiliated with the ANC; and widespread student protests in 2015 and 2016.
All these developments have called into question the conceptual foundations of the post-apartheid settlement, not least rainbowism, the fledgling state myth of a non-racial, cooperative democracy on a forward march of progress aimed at healing the legacies of apartheid and colonialism. This universalist vision, encapsulated in the ANC's 1955 Freedom Charter's assertion that “South Africa belongs to all who live in it,” was gradually undermined by persistent inequality and a state overrun by corruption. Instead, a void opened up.
Despite the loss of support for the ANC, no political force has yet emerged to fill it. The Economic Freedom Fighters, led by militant Julius Malema, were once one of the most exciting newcomers to the electoral landscape. But its national profile has stalled, and where it has governed – such as in coalition with the ANC in Johannesburg and Durban – it has had an uninspiring record. The party's claim to be more authentic implementers of the ANC's politics of national liberation, prepared to properly confront what it calls white monopoly capital, makes it more difficult to distinguish itself. This does not have to be a problem, there is speculation that the country is seeking a place in the government as a junior coalition partner.
The other major opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, has chosen a different route. While the animating grievances of the Economic Freedom Fighters are that post-apartheid democracy has done little to regain political and economic control over black South Africans, the Democratic Alliance has underscored white problems with black majority rule. Having long abandoned the strategy of cultivating black leadership in the party, the campaign consisted mainly of alarmist warnings about continued ANC rule – what its allies call Zimbabwefication – while flirting with separatist sentiments in the redoubt of the province of Western Cape.
South African political life once operated on the assumptions of common citizenship; politicians disagreed on issues of governance and distribution, but there was a shared, if sometimes reluctant, commitment to the democratic process and belief in the membership of every South African in the polity. Now the so-called national question dominates the political spectrum. The question of who we are has replaced more programmatic questions about what kind of society South Africans want to live in.
In this vacuum of political imaginationidentity has become the dividing line of society. To the right of the major parties are more openly chauvinistic forces. Parties like ActionSA, led by a former mayor of Johannesburg, combine public order abuse with anti-migrant policies. This attitude is shared by the Patriotic Alliance, a formation led by a former gangster that has consolidated its base – voters who are mostly Coloured, as multi-ethnic South Africans are called – through a revived colored nationalism. Rise Mzansi, led by a former business journalist compares itself to President Emmanuel Macron of France, deviates from this script. But its limited appeal to industry professionals will do little to assuage the growing sense that the country's fissures are insurmountable.
Amid global dissatisfaction with liberal democracy, South Africa is not alone in seeing revanchism reshape the political terrain. The public reaction has generally been resignation. In 1994, with a turnout of 86 percent, more than 12 million South Africans voted for Mandela's government. After centuries of oppression, exploitation and struggle, people were filled with hope that democracy would bring a better life. In the last national elections, in 2019, turnout fell by 20 percent and more than two million ANC voters were lost. Many are fed up with the government's failure to improve their lives and have simply given up on politics.
This process of disengagement – reflected in declining participation in trade unions, civic associations and political parties – is difficult to reconcile with the images of the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-class movement against apartheid that led the world to believe that South Africans were were uniquely endowed with a high level of social consciousness and goodwill. As that national story loses its coherence, the country is reinventing itself. Like Tintswalo, the new South Africa has come of age and is on the cusp of becoming something else. At this point we just don't know what.
William Shoki is an editor at Africa Is a Country, an independent online publication.
Source images from Getty Images, Associated Press, Reuters, Satour, SABC News, News24 and the artist's collection.
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