South Africans head to polls. After 30 years, has Mandela’s party lost its luster?

On a crisp autumn morning in April 1994, Margaret and Veronica Genge stepped out of their stout brick house in the Soweto neighborhood of Dube, and walked into the future.

History rarely snaps neatly in half, with a clear “before” and “after,” but in South Africa, at that particular moment, it did.

Mother and daughter left home still second-class citizens of a country that had been ruled by white people for three centuries. They returned a few hours later as voters in the election that, within a week, would sweep that old world away.

Like most of the 20 million South Africans who cast their ballots during those electrifying days, the Genges voted for the African National Congress (ANC), the organization that had led the anti-apartheid movement.

Thirty years later, South Africans are voting again this week, in an election that marks another turning point in the young country’s history. For the first time ever, the ANC’s share of the national vote may dip below 50%, forcing the ruling party to share power with the opposition. 

This time around, three generations of Genges will cast their ballots – Margaret, her four children, and her 19-year-old granddaughter. But the excitement that fizzed around the 1994 vote is long gone.

In its place is a sense of betrayal, shared by millions.

“All my life I was an ANC supporter because I thought they were going to do better for all of us,” says Margaret, who is now 70 years old. So why, the Genges’ soft-spoken matriarch wondered, were so many people around her still so poor? When, exactly, were things going to get better?

As the anger bloomed in her chest, she had begun to consider something that was once unthinkable.

“This year,” she told her children, “I don’t think I will vote at all.” 

A childhood amid violence

For 66 years, the Genge family has lived in the same three-bedroom house in Soweto, the grid of working-class Black suburbs built by the apartheid government on Johannesburg’s southern edge.

Margaret was a young girl asleep in her bed here during the nights in the early 1960s when police regularly stormed Nelson Mandela’s red brick house a mile and a half away, searching for the ANC leader, then underground and on the run.

Veronica grew up in the family’s Soweto house, too. In one of her first memories, from 1976, she is 4 years old, sitting on the living room floor and listening to the crackle of gunfire. It is the sound of security forces nearby shooting live bullets into a crowd of protesters, most of them children in their school uniforms.

After that, Veronica says, the house’s doors were always locked. Adults told her that if she saw the police, she should turn and run.

In the 1980s, Margaret moved to Yeoville, a vibrant neighborhood near downtown Johannesburg, packed with alternative bookstores, smoky dance bars, and street cafés with striped awnings and elegant foreign names such as Café Pigalle. Black people weren’t technically allowed to live there, but apartheid’s grip was already weakening. The nearby Holiday Inn, where Margaret washed dishes, welcomed Black customers too, and on the weekends, when her kids visited her from Soweto, they splashed around with white children in the Yeoville swembad.

At home in Soweto, things were also changing. In 1987, after three decades of using greasy paraffin lamps for light, the Genges finally saw their house connected to the power grid. The family bought a tiny TV and watched news programs speculating that Mr. Mandela might soon walk free.

When he did emerge from jail in February 1990, after 27 years in prison, the Genges danced in the street. “It was like God himself had come to save us,” says Veronica’s younger sister Nkosazana, who was 11 at the time. “You can’t imagine our happiness.”

Scandals erode faith in the ANC

But sometime in the years since, the family’s optimism began to unravel.

Maybe it happened during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when no one could work and soldiers frog-marched curfew-breakers through the township streets like criminals.

Or maybe it was the electricity problems. For the last two years, the power in Johannesburg has often been switched off for several hours each day, as an overloaded national power grid buckles.

As in the old days, the Genges fired up their paraffin lamps for light.

Maybe, though, the disenchantment came from something bigger than any of that – a nagging sense that South Africa was going backward. In some ways, of course, they knew that things were better than before 1994. Soweto had paved roads, piped water, whole new neighborhoods of identical little houses that the ANC government handed out for free.

At the same time, most Black South Africans were still poor. The country has one of the highest recorded unemployment rates in the world – more than 30%. ANC leaders have seemed to be constantly embroiled in scandal, such as the discovery that President Cyril Ramaphosa kept half a million dollars in cash stuffed in the cushions of his couch.

For Veronica, the contrast was painful: all that money sloshing around, while people like her lost sleep every time the price of bread went up by another rand ($0.05).

As the May 29 election date approached, Veronica and Nkosazana weighed up their choices lethargically. They were tired of the ANC, but then what? On the telephone poles around Soweto, the opposition parties’ campaign posters seemed to meld together into one generic chorus of despair. 

Rescue South Africa. Stop the suffering. We need new leaders.

Uninspiring election options

But while the ANC’s support has been steadily declining since the 1990s, none of its challengers has commanded enough support, until now, to unseat it. The closest anyone has come is the white-led Democratic Alliance, which grew out of an opposition party from the apartheid era. But the DA has failed to build support among the Black working class.

“I heard they still have hatred in their hearts,” Margaret says.

Meanwhile, the other major opposition party in this election is a fiery leftist movement called the Economic Freedom Fighters, which splintered from the ANC in 2013. Recent polls show the DA hovering around 20% of the vote, and the EFF around 10%.

But Veronica, Nkosazana, and her 19-year-old daughter Angela have settled on another upstart party, uMkhonto weSizwe, or MK – which was also the name of the ANC’s armed wing during the liberation struggle. It is led by former president and ANC stalwart Jacob Zuma, a grandfatherly populist who has a complex reputation, as the Genges are the first to admit.

“We know he steals,” Veronica says, referring to the corruption scandals that clouded Mr. Zuma’s tenure from 2009 to 2018. “But he also shares.” 

Last week, a court ruled that Mr. Zuma was ineligible to run for office because of his criminal convictions. But the younger Genges decided to stick with his party anyway.

They coaxed their mother to cast a ballot, too. 

“Ma, you have to,” Nkosazana told her.

 “I guess so,” Margaret said, sighing heavily. It was just that all the choices felt so uninspiring. One thing, though, she knew for sure.

“I’ve given up on the ANC,” she said. “They expect us to keep supporting them forever, and then they give us nothing in return.”