This piece was put together by Lydia Polgreen for New York Times.
If you want to understand why the party that liberated South Africa from white rule lost its parliamentary majority in the election this week, you need to look no further than Beauty Mzingeli’s living room. The first time she cast a ballot, she could hardly sleep the night before.
“We were queuing by 4 in the morning,” she told me at her home in Khayelitsha, a township in the flatlands outside Cape Town. “We couldn’t believe that we were free, that finally our voices were going to be heard.”
That was 30 years ago, in the election in which she was one of millions of South Africans who voted the African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela, into power, ushering in a new, multiracial democracy.
But at noon on Wednesday, Election Day, as I settled onto a sofa in her tidy bungalow, she confessed that she had not yet made up her mind about voting — she might, for the first time, she told me, cast a ballot for another party. Or maybe she might do the unthinkable and not vote at all.
“Politicians promise us everything,” she sighed. “But they don’t deliver. Why should I give them my vote?”
That a mighty party like the A.N.C., which delivered one of the most inspiring triumphs of the 20th century, could a few decades later be dismissed by a loyal voter as mere “politicians,” hardly worth a trek to the polls, may seem like a dispiriting outcome. The A.N.C. could be forced for the first time into an unwieldy coalition government with smaller parties that might not make for ideal allies.
This change of fortune naturally sparks fear and speculation: Has South Africa’s transition failed, and is the country headed for the kind of strife that has bedeviled most countries in the aftermath of liberation from colonization?
South Africa has long loomed large in the global imagination. It is a country that was born at a particularly potent time in human history, at the end of the Cold War, built in the aftermath of grave injustice and constituted under a set of egalitarian ideas. It was, and is, as a new democracy, a symbol of what a new future might look like.
It is natural that 30 years later, we might ask for a verdict on how it has all gone, especially living as we do now, with sprawling wars on at least four continents, democracy in retreat in many places across the globe and a new conflagration in Israel and Palestine, a place that resonates with South Africa’s story.
Read the rest of her article published in The New York Times
Ms. Polgreen is an Opinion columnist. She reported across South Africa for 10 days for this column.
