Almost two-thirds of the current electorate could not have voted in the first all-race elections in 1994. After the apathy of the past 15 years, why does voting feel so important this time around?
On Instagram on 18 May, a South African woman living in London posted, "this is my third election while living in the UK and I have never seen this many people in line. It feels like 1994 again. Praying for our country's future." On the ground in South Africa, after the apathy of the past three election, there is an importance to these elections that has been lacking. In a country where the average age is 27.6 years old, South Africa's Independent Electoral Commission's voter register has the majority of voters aged 49 and under. To put this in perspective, apart from a few in this demographic who were 18 in 1994, 64 percent of South Africa's registered voters for this election can say honestly as one of the parties is advertising, 2024 is our 1994. But why such urgency and why this particular comparison 30 years later? In the long queues of the 1994 elections, there was hope that the country was changing for the better. Young people previously designated as non-European in this African country joined their grandparents in their 90s casting their very first vote. Prior to 1994, only the European vote counted in the Republic of South Africa. In 2024, the feeling on the ground seems to be that this is the last hope. That this is the last chance to Save South Africa, to borrow from a political party's campaign slogan.
So where did the hope of 1994 begin to dim? What went wrong in the course of the past 30 years that South Africans who have registered in their droves hope will be rectified? If election manifestos of the leading parties are to be believed, the key issues in this election are: economy, education, healthcare and corruption. The emphasis on what should be done to solve any and all of these is what sets apart each political party's electoral manifesto and the articulation of these issues - sloganeering if you will - is what seems to be attracting voters to decide who they will vote for.
It is late December 2023, in the small town of Stutterheim, or eCumakala as we call it in isiXhosa, in the Eastern Cape. I am at a mgidi for my nephew, Siya. One of my female cousins advises him, 'mchana, you went up the mountain a boy, you came down a man. And as a man, we expect you to now apply yourself with maturity. Moreso as these will be your first elections. Vote wisely in May.' Everyone bursts out laughing. This is not the usual advice given to a young man at this event. They are told how to stand up among their peers, look after their future families, treat women with respect. But this is a small town that prior to the 2021 elections, burnt down the municipal offices in protest against corruption that had over 100 ghost workers on the payroll of a municipality staffed with less than 40 people. To pay the ghost workers, the municipality increased rates and water bills of residents. By committing arson, the records were wiped clean of the hiked-up rates. As far as I know, no-one was ever charged for this. Even the police, one imagines, understood the people's grievance.
This is also the small town where the unemployment rate is so high that conversations with family members one hasn't seen for a long time invariably contain a request for a job in Johannesburg or Cape Town. Home to the former Premier of the Eastern Cape, African National Congress (then Congress of the People, then Democratic Alliance and now ANC again) member Nosimo Balindlela, eCumakala, like many small towns in South Africa, still maintains apartheid spatial planning. The central business district, if it can be called that, is walking distance from the previously and still mostly white suburb of Forest View, while the township of Mlungisi where the majority of the town's black people stay is a 20-rand taxi ride away. And yet despite municipal buildings burnt in protest, high unemployment rate, badly maintained infrastructure, eCumakala has always voted for the governing party. In December, posters for new party, RISE Mzansi, seemed to be all over the CBD. It will be interesting to see whether this small town's idea of voting wisely is more of the same, perhaps hoping that change finally, will somehow come.
In the early '50s during apartheid, some African families in Bushbuckridge were removed from their homes to Pilgrim's Rest in Mpumalanga, their land given to some European farmer by the apartheid regime. Among the removed was five-year-old Kenny, now in his 70s, who left with his aunt and grandmother. A few years later, Kenny would move to Johannesburg to stay with his mother and start school. On a wet January morning, I travel with him and his 40-year-old son Neo, also a businessman, to Pilgrim's Rest. We start off at his cousin's home where he picks up his cousin en route to a farm. The cousin walks with us and points at a spot. Kenny and his son are about to embark on a business venture, so they are here to inform his grandmother, considered a close ancestor by both. At her grave, they shall pour libations and ask for her protection and guidance in their journey.
We came with the cousin because Kenny did not know where his grandmother was buried. After he left for Johannesburg in the early 1960s, his grandmother and other relatives were removed from the place he left them. She died on this farm where they are now pouring libations. But the community was again removed to make way for another white man. Today, we are considered trespassers. We hope the 'owner', if he comes through, will be a reasonable man.
"Can you imagine what we could do with this land?' asks Neo. Back in Johannesburg, he is the co-owner of an upmarket coffee shop. He went to schools where black boys talked about being in the Rowing Club. But even he feels there was an immense failure by the governing party in settling the land question. "The sunset clause (a reference to the sunset clause of the Congress for a Democratic South Africa) ended in 2014, why are we still sneaking into land on which our ancestors are buried?" Certainly among the privileged black people, Neo thinks the country can do better. He doesn't stutter or sound coy when I ask him who he is voting for. 'We need a radical shift. I am definitely voting Economic Freedom Fighters." Neo's former Maths teacher, possibly named Mr, Van der Byl, would be horrified.
"I decided to go and wait in line at my voting station at about 2am on the 27th of April, 1994," Vusumuzi in Groutville in Kwazulu Natal recounts in early February as he cuts a customer's hair. "It seemed I was not the only one who had decided to do that as there were already some people in line when I got there. Hey, I was excited that day. We all were. And everyone was being so nice to each other, we had hope." He ends with a faraway look. Vusumuzi says he was one of the young men who saw hope in the African National Congress. And it's easy to see why. Groutville is home to the late African National Congress President and South Africa's first Nobel Laureate, Albert Luthuli. The governing African National Congress has always won resoundingly until the local elections of 2021 when they went below 50 percent and could only run the municipality as part of a coalition government. Vusumuzi is a visual artist but, as he only ever gets commissioned by a few vain politicians and their wives to do busts for important birthdays, he now cuts hair in a complex that sees little foot action even on a Friday afternoon at the end of the month. When he is done cutting the client, a writer from Johannesburg who has come for a literary festival, he tells him it's 35 rand. Almost as though he expects to negotiate. Instead, the writer goes and buys him a two-litre Coke. "Thanks grootman. So who are you voting for this time? Still ANC?" Vusumuzi laughs derisively. "Those ones must voetsek. They will not see my vote." Unless something else happens, he will vote for Inkatha Freedom Party, he says. When Vusumuzi is asked where he thinks the ANC went wrong, he sounds disappointed, "Corruption. In this municipality, one can't get anything done unless they know someone. And it would be okay," he adds philosophically, "iff the person who knows someone knew what they were doing. But they are incompetent and nothing gets done like it's supposed to."
For the past 15 years, the Democratic Alliance has run the Western Cape uncontested. Some political commentators like to put it down to the rift between Black people, referred to in South African official documents as Africans, and Coloureds. Coloureds voted for the African National Congress and gave it the province until 2009. Then feeling that the government had not looked after their interests - "we are too black to be white and not white enough for the Africans," - they switched their votes to the Democratic Alliance. They would likely have kept it there if there had not been a discussion and later on, a vote in Parliament on the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to South Africa post-October 7, 2023. A pro-Palestinian activist and 60-year-old mother of four, Nuran who stays in Bo-Kaap, states at a gathering on Human Rights Day, "Ag maan. We can't be voting for Zionists. Me and all my neighbours are voting for the ANC." When I ask her about all the complaints they have had in the past about the ANC and whether they think this time it will be different, she shrugs her shoulders. "It's better than bringing apartheid back. In showing support for Israel, the DA has shown that they can do that to us again. And anyway," she adds, "all their development is in white areas. We have one of the highest murder rates in the country." I ask whether the Patriotic Alliance of Gayton Mackenzie would not be an option since he is Coloured. "That skollie is a Zionist as well. We aren't voting for him."
In April I travel to Mafikeng in Northwest province for a meeting. The meeting is delayed because there is a protest. Buses have been burnt; provincial workers have not been paid. The next morning, I talk to the young woman working at the BnB where I am staying. She says she studied engineering because she hoped she would get a job in middle management in the mining industry. "I finished studying but have not got my grades yet because I am owing the university. That's why I am working here so I can pay what I owe and hopefully I can then get my degree and get a job." Is she registered to vote? I ask her. "It's not going to change anything. I am not voting. I don't care. They always promise us so much but give nothing when we put them in charge."
We have breakfast in a Wimpy in Liechtenburg, a town not too far away from Mafikeng. Tshepo who serves us says he is voting for the Democratic Alliance. "How come?' I ask him. "My sister, black people have failed us. Maybe it's better if white people come back in power. My mother told me things used to work so much better when the whites were in charge. Everyone in our house is voting for the DA." I avoid telling him that the last time white people were in charge, he probably would not have been serving us. Maybe that's the point.
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Back in Johannesburg on my way to my grandmother's home in Orlando West Extension in Soweto from the northern suburbs, an Uber driver starts an election conversation with me. He wants to know whether I am voting. I answer in the affirmative. He asks who I am voting for. I give my noncommittal 'undecided' answer. He tells me I should vote for Mkhonto we Sizwe, the new Jacob Zuma party. "But why? We gave uBaba almost two terms and he didn't do well and anyway, wasn't he supposed to be sick?" His attempts to convince me that this is the party to vote for is telling. Instead of convincing me what I shall be getting from old wine in a new wineskin, he tells me of the failures of Zuma's successor, Cyril Ramaphosa. "My sister, we have never had Level 8 loadshedding," in reference to the electricity cuts we have suffered. "They haven't loadshed us now for a while because they think we forgot." I find myself unable to disagree with him, even though I'm still not buying what he is selling.
At my grandmother's house, my cousins and I gist. Nomonde says she will vote for former Johannesburg Mayor's ActionSA.
"Didn't he stop Soweto residents from getting six thousand litres of free water?" Her sister's husband Asanda asks.
"I don't care. At least he will put our economy here in the townships back in our hands instead of those of foreigners. He cleaned up Johannesburg of illegals when he was Mayor.'
I decide to listen rather than participate. But it's perhaps Mandisa who articulates the delusions of the hopes Black people had in 1994 and why 2024 elections seem so important.
"Abogogo were celebrating the ability to vote for a party every five years, a flag and a Nkosi Sikelela remixed with the apartheid anthem but nothing changed. Who still owns our banks, our mines, our land? How could our greatest aspiration be to be able to walk on the pavements with white people and sit in the same restaurant as them even if the restaurants were not ours? I think we need a different party from the ANC and if that different party fails us, we will vote them out in 2029 and we keep trying until we get the South Africa we deserve."
Hopeful words just as we all yell, 'yhu.'
The light in the living room has just gone out.
We are unsure whether the bulb has burnt out or it's loadshedding again.
Zukiswa Wanner is an award-winning South African journalist, novelist and editor.
