South African democracy still being born

Democracy is not only elections. Voting only one way, though important, that we, often poorly but also often earnestly, try to turn our hopes and desires into government by the people.

This month, the number of countries conducting electoral contests is staggering. I focus on the domestic antics, Mr Trump the unstable criminal v. President Biden the wounded healer. But India, Mexico, Iran, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the European Union are also up in the current moment.

I have no expertise on any of these but our own, but I'm fascinated by developments in South Africa.

Hung on a Cape Town lamp post, 1990

Way back, in 1990, together with Erudite Partner, I had the privilege of working to provide technical assistance to tiny South African newspapers which were promoting the African National Congress (ANC) message of post-apartheid non-racial justice and freedom. 

This was a strange in-between time; a month before we arrived, ANC leader Nelson Mandela had been released from 27 years imprisonment by the whites-only government, signaling that its system for repression of the non-white majority could not last. Cape Town was alive with excitement, hope, and more than a little trepidation.

But nobody yet knew what would come next. Could a democratic system for all South Africans be made out of the aspirations of the freedom struggle? That vision would have to overcome not only racial categories but also rural poverty and yawning educational and economic inequality if South Africans were to forge a multiracial democracy. And very obviously, this wasn't going to be a smooth process. Pure energy couldn't substitute for learning to work together in new ways.

One anecdote: a member of the staff of a newspaper in Cape Town came to us with a personal request. In this moment of liberation, the ANC was forming local branch committees around town; mass organization that had -- of necessity -- worked hidden and underground was going to come out in the open. She was excited; she needed a flyer to post inviting her neighbors to a meeting. Her radical headline was "Come Elect Your Leaders!"

Of course, we helped her. And then a few days later, she brought the flyer back. There must be a different headline: "Come Meet Your Leaders!" We helped with that too. Evidently the local ANC didn't feel entirely ready for an entirely open process.

That small episode came to capture for me the thousands of such difficult transitions that very ordinary people were attempting while moving toward majority rule. Good people who had suffered horrible oppression were trying to build something altogether new and brave -- this would not be smooth and simple.

And it still isn't.

The first universal, free, and non-racial election in South Africa took place in 1994. Nelson Mandela and the ANC completely dominated the new democracy. And until this week, the ANC remained the overwhelmingly dominant party in free South Africa. Sometimes it governed well; sometimes its leaders succumbed to national and world capitalism, grabbed for personal wealth, and became high-handed, forgetting the masses who put them there.

Lynsey Chutel reports on the election last week:

For the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994, the party once led by Nelson Mandela failed to win an outright majority of the votes in a national election. ...

While the African National Congress, or A.N.C., remains the leading party in the May 29 election, the latest tally is widely viewed as a political defeat and a rebuke from voters ... who have become exasperated with the only party they have known since the end of apartheid. In the last election, in 2019, the A.N.C. took nearly 58 percent of the vote. The drop to about 40 percent in this election has cost the party its majority in Parliament, which elects the country’s president.

Voting-aged South Africans born after apartheid, in 1994, have some of the lowest registration numbers, while those who endured the worst of the apartheid regime are aging. Instead, a generation who experienced the euphoria and economic growth of post-apartheid South Africa, and then the decline and despondency that followed, have soured on the A.N.C.

“Maybe they had a plan to fight apartheid, but not a plan for the economy,” Ms. Mathivha [in northern Johannesburg] said.

... “More than anything,” she said, “the A.N.C. has been humbled.”

The humbled ANC will have to try to form a coalition government with other parties. The Guardian has a very clear discussion of the parties involved and how this might work.

Lydia Polgreen, who served as the New York Times Southern Africa reporter in the last decade, muses reflectively from the Cape Town region:

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.

... there are no miracles here, and that is a good thing. Because miracles cannot be repeated. But what can be repeated is the hard, sometimes ugly, always unglamorous work of compromise and negotiation, and the working through of the inevitable consequences of those compromises. It is only through this process of improvisation and invention that true self-determination comes.

The business of ending apartheid as a form of government in South Africa is over. It is never coming back. But if this election tells us anything, it is that the work of building a true multiracial democracy has really just begun.

South Africa is a beautiful place full of brave people. If, under the constraints of a terrible history, a grossly unequal world economic order, and escalating climate emergencies, any nation can construct something new, democratic, and more humane, this land still has a good a chance.