9
SOUTH AFRICA’S WINTER sun was already setting by the time I arrived back at my Krugersdorp guesthouse, the Rabbit Hole, a little after 5 p.m. on May 8. The polls for the 2019 election would officially close in less than four hours. I parked my car in one of the covered spots, a late attempt to shield it from further aviary attack. When I returned to my room, I kept my jacket on and fired up the electric space heater, as a cool day had turned into a cold night. And now it was time to learn what the South Africans had collectively decided about this election and to reflect on the broader democratic experiment in this divided society.
The television was filled with scenes much like the ones I had witnessed earlier: people waiting in lines, usually short ones, and emerging from voting booths more or less happy to have done their civic duty. Various commentators, election commission officials, and police officers addressed concerns that had been raised throughout the day. One video of a lone man in Limpopo Province carrying a voting box, presumably with nefarious intent, had gone viral. A few polling stations never opened, and a few others ran out of ballots. In response, the officials credibly assured the public that these had been isolated incidents, and in their estimation, it had been a valid election.
Some of the smaller parties nonetheless raised charges of unfair electoral procedures and threatened legal action against the state. I was immediately skeptical of the veracity of these challenges because in order to appear on the ballot, each party had to put up 200,000 rand for the national election, and/or 45,000 for the provincial one, and if they didn’t win at least one seat, the money was not returned. Such policies were designed to discourage extremely low-support organizations from overwhelming the ballot list. The IEC might not have liked all the headaches associated with the 48 parties in the national contest, but at least they got to keep over 16 million rand (at the time, about a million U.S. dollars) worth of deposits from the losers.1
The IEC promised the results would be available no later than Saturday, and counting began immediately on that Wednesday evening. By the middle of the day after the election, the numbers were showing that the ANC was in strong shape to win the national election, albeit with the universally predicted diminished majority. Gauteng Province, however, was a nail-biter. One interim count had the ruling party at 49.5 percent, and I imagined emotions at various party headquarters were running high: if the ANC just barely failed to get a majority, at least one small party might realize its dream of becoming a “king-maker” in a coalition government. Meanwhile, confirming preelection polls, the DA was already looking like the big loser relative to their high hopes following years of upward growth.
While the country was still in electoral purgatory awaiting final results, I went to follow up with several of the people I had gotten to know around Mogale City over the previous five months to get their take. I had spent a lot of time over at the Krugersdorp News, talking to reporters and looking through their old bound volumes. I emailed the editor and asked if I could chat with her and a few of the reporters about what everyone had observed and heard, and I would share my impressions as well. She kindly accepted, and I went to the newsroom in the morning with a bag of baked goods, my own form of enticement in exchange for their time.
When I arrived, the newsroom was full—she had invited all of the reporters and a bunch from their sister newspaper, the Roodepoort Record, owned by the same company, to participate. As I sat down at the head of a long table, I faced several cameras atop tripods: in a world of social media all the time, they broadcast the meeting live on Facebook.
I learned that on election day, the reporters had divided up the municipality; and as I had done, they interviewed voters as they exited the polling stations. Their stories and impressions of a largely smooth election confirmed what I had heard. Unlike me, the staff members also participated in the vote and could share their personal experiences. “For me, this election was kind of big,” said one reporter. “I thought this was going to be a watershed election.” Another said, “People were optimistic for change. People wanted change.… I think they wanted the change … [but] it doesn’t look like anything big will happen.”
When it came to the role of race in politics, the reporters were not of one mind and clearly varied according to their own racial identities. Most of the Krugersdorp News reporters were White, and one said she wondered if this was the election in which the country could finally “get past” race. A Black reporter who had visited the upscale and largely White neighborhood of Ruimsig said, “I noticed that the racial tension was there … maybe they didn’t want to talk with a Black journalist.”
I asked the reporters whether they felt they cover enough good news in Mogale City. Did the fact that they tend to write about what fails leave citizens more skeptical than the reality warranted? What about Ethembalethu? I initially faced a room of blank stares, as most were unaware of the place that was on my mind. One Black reporter confirmed he had been there, described it, and agreed that it was a successful community. Another reporter mentioned that the News did cover a more recent story of the handover of 100 RDP houses, but yet another asked if it was right to give a pat on the back to government for delivering 100 houses after twenty-five years. The editor added that they do cover some good news stories, including of people reaching out in positive ways to members of other communities, which was true.
I thanked them for their time, knowing they had a newspaper to put out, and headed over to the Mogale City Council Speaker’s office to discuss her views about the election. I had met with Noluthando Mangole a few times on prior trips, and I knew she’d be working hard on this election. Though slight in stature, she was usually big on energy and presence. On this day, she seemed tired and down, even as she was fully decked out in ANC regalia, with her hair covered in a green and gold ANC scarf.
“It was hectic,” she uttered a common South African expression. “To a large extent, Mogale City seemed not to have performed quite well in Gauteng and the results seem to be so low.” She complained of the problem of factions within the party, which affect daily governance in the municipality and the coordination of the campaign. She said she was surprised and a bit disappointed that there had not been any rallies in Mogale City. “In previous years, we used to have rallies around here. But resources were a bit of a challenge this time around.”
Despite Mangole’s pessimistic tone, by midday Saturday, it was official: the election was declared “free and fair,” and for all the excitement, the talk of political change, the effective balance of power remained exactly as it had been: Ramaphosa would continue on as president of the country, as the ANC secured 57.5 percent of the national proportional representation vote. Eight of the nine provinces, including Gauteng with its just barely enough 50.1 percent of the votes, went to the ANC. Considering the results in Mogale City, the municipality proved, once again, to be broadly reflective of trends in Gauteng, and in South Africa more generally, albeit weighted toward its proportionally larger White and Afrikaans-speaking population. And in fact, the ANC did better than the Speaker lamented to me when we met in her office that Friday afternoon, receiving 52.1 percent of the votes cast in the municipality.
Although ANC leaders were disappointed to be shedding seats in national and provincial legislatures, implying fewer key jobs for party insiders and evidence of the erosion of their electoral dominance, they had to be relieved.
Like any election, at least in the near term, it was a success for the winners and viewed as the opposite for the losers. The question for the longer term is whether such competitive practice and the other trappings of democracy benefit the larger whole, particularly with respect to dignified development.
I address such questions in the remainder of this conclusory chapter. First, I consider what we can learn from this particular election with respect to the hopes and concerns of prior decades and as documented in earlier chapters. Second, I discuss the South African case in relation to the analogous American experiment with post–civil rights desegregation, drawing many key parallels. And finally, I try to extract some lessons about democratic practice amid diversity from all that we’ve learned in this investigation, for South Africa and other divided societies.
Done and Dusted: Another Election in the Books
The May 2019 election was a fitting bookend to the first quarter century of democratic government. Electoral performance is shaped by many factors, and no vote tally can offer a fully clear or complete mandate concerning the “will of the people.” Nonetheless, the election conveyed a great deal of information about citizens’ wants and needs, it reflected the further routinization of liberal democracy, and it offered a feedback mechanism for reinforcing gains in dignified development.
First of all, it does appear that the contest was indeed free and fair, and its legitimacy was essentially unchallenged. It’s impossible to know for sure the extent of irregularities, but few were reported, and those that were brought to light could not have materially affected the results.
Back in Mogale City, the election mostly went well, though not perfectly. A non-trivial 8.5 percent of Black Africans said that they had been threatened with violence in the weeks leading up to the election. And it was almost double that in Munsieville’s Ward 27. Almost no one reported having been offered money for their votes. But about 10 percent of Black Africans said that in the weeks prior to the election, representatives from a political party had bought groceries for them. Threats of violence were clearly undemocratic, but grocery parcels struck me as fair game in a democratic polity so long as there was no explicit or enforceable quid pro quo in the form of votes.2
However, as expected, especially with the chilly and rainy weather I experienced on election day—and which blanketed much of the country—turnout was disappointing. Just 66.1 percent of the registered voters cast their ballots, and only about 3 of 4 citizens eligible to vote were registered. The turnout metric according to voting age population was under 47 percent, which is low by international standards, particularly as compared with 1999 when more than 70 percent of eligible voters actually voted.3 It was a middling performance compared to other African countries’ turnout in recent years.4
Second, the election reflected that South African politics was becoming more competitive. The ANC was still strong, but the results offered more evidence that the country had not become the one-party state that some feared as an inevitable fate. It was the ANC’s worst showing in a national election, while several small parties enjoyed substantial gains.
Despite its several-year rise, the DA was not the prime beneficiary of the ANC’s losses. The party would remain as official opposition with 20.8 percent of the national vote and 24.6 percent of the Mogale vote, but this was a substantial drop-off from 2014, when they received 22.2 percent and 29.6 percent, respectively. The DA’s support in the Western Cape was also diminished, but they still received enough votes to remain in charge of that province.
By contrast, the EFF, the IFP, and the FF+ enjoyed the biggest gains nationally, albeit from much smaller bases. Only six years old, the EFF took in 10.8 percent of the national vote and was massively successful in Mogale, with 12 percent. Next was the IFP with 3.4 percent, which also marked an increase from the prior election. And the FF+ made big gains from less than 1 percent to 2.4 percent nationally, while in Mogale their vote share was a substantial 7.1 percent.
Increased representation of several parties implied more inclusion and pluralism. Yet, the implications of growing support for these particular parties—the EFF, the IFP, and the FF+—was double-edged, because each had advocated ethnic autonomy or even exclusion during the campaign. They might not have said so explicitly in their party manifestoes, but these parties had defined themselves in terms of particular racial or ethnic groups, and together, they doubled their combined 8.3 percent vote share from the 2014 national election to 16.6 percent in 2019.
While the ANC’s decline was notable, the election could also be seen in a slightly different light: given widespread perceptions of poor performance and reports of corruption filling the airwaves in the months prior, as well as some polls showing that they might not win a majority of votes, the ANC also exceeded many expectations. One plausible interpretation is that Ramaphosa’s appeal stemmed from a credible commitment to resist the “state capture” of the Zuma years.5 In other words, despite a shared party brand, Ramaphosa managed to shed some of the ANC’s accumulated baggage by distancing himself from the Zuma faction.
It would be an overstatement to suggest that the election was itself a referendum on the previous twenty-five years. On the other hand, the likelihood that citizens voted for the ANC was clearly associated with their views of the past, even if not in a strictly causal manner. For example, in my survey of Mogale City residents, 81 percent of Black Africans who said life was better now were also likely to say they supported the ANC. A smaller share of those who said that life was worse now also said they were supporting the ANC—but it was still 66 percent. Although far fewer Whites supported the ANC, positive views about post-Apartheid life were associated with an 11-percentage-point jump in the proportion of those reporting ANC support.6
Not surprisingly, racial dynamics were clearly at play in the election, although race and ethnicity were much less determinative of voters’ choices than many democratic theorists had once feared. For example, while both of the “big-tent” parties in terms of geographic, ethnic, and racial reach may have shed vote share, virtually all of government would remain in these parties’ respective hands after the election. Combined, the ANC and the DA took in 78.3 percent of the national vote. The ANC was no longer espousing the type of “non-racialism” it once did, but it was also still fairly moderate in its approach and certainly did not employ racially exclusionary rhetoric to attract supporters. In a country that is about 80 percent Black African, the fact that just over 50 percent of the vote went to the ANC meant that many Black voters opted for other parties. Moreover, many Whites I spoke with in and outside of Mogale said they voted for the ANC, even if it was not the party they most favored, because they preferred to see an ANC government to a coalition that might include the EFF.
Indeed many Black voters went for the EFF, some for the IFP, and others for the DA. Presumably, many Zulu voters who had gone with the ANC under Zuma now returned to the IFP fold—a full 95 percent of the IFP’s votes came from the Zulu-dominant KwaZulu-Natal Province. And its only significant support in Mogale City was in Ward 15, with its substantial Zulu minority. However, the party did not perform well in other wards with sizable Zulu shares. The EFF most likely gained its support from a combination of ANC defectors and young new voters angry with the ANC for various reasons.
Beyond Zulu-based support for the IFP, however, there is very little evidence supporting the idea that African language was a good predictor of party support in Mogale, Gauteng Province, or nationwide.
Among Whites, the DA was still the most popular choice, but in this election, many voted for the FF+. The FF+ took in at least one-third of the White vote in the municipality.7 In seven wards, they attained 19 percent or more of the vote, including in Ward 22, where I had seen the FF+ councillor expressing confidence on election day. With Mmusi Maimane, a Black man, at the head of the DA ticket, and with other policy changes intended to attract a broader constituency, many Whites no longer felt represented by this self-avowed “non-racial” party. Moreover, FF+ support was not simply White but Afrikaner-based, reflecting the fact that the old inter-White cleavage never fully disappeared.8
Citizens had real choices, and changes in vote shares within voting districts across the country made clear that citizens were using their votes to send signals to politicians about what they did and didn’t like.9 In fact, one of the most profound findings from analysis of voting returns is the degree to which extreme levels of party support as measured at individual voting stations and at the ward level were reversed from the 2016 election. That is, both the ANC and the DA each tended to shed the most votes in the areas where they had done best and gained the most votes in the areas where they had done worst.
Several other factors, discussed in the three prior chapters, also helped to predict vote choices, citizen views about how life compared now to under Apartheid, or both.10
For example, engagement in democratic practice and perceptions of quality of governance were important predictors of positive views: Black Africans were substantially more likely to say they viewed post-Apartheid life favorably if they had attended a ward committee meeting in the past month or if they said they felt a ward councillor listened to “someone like them.”
Views about the post-Apartheid era and vote choices were also predicted by the material conditions in which people reported living, but the patterns were not particularly strong or even in the direction many might predict. For example, 54 percent of Black respondents who lived in a formal dwelling and had a job said life was better now; by contrast only 31 percent of those Blacks with neither a formal house nor a job said that life was better today. Among the Black Africans surveyed in Ethembalethu—the successful, subsidized housing development in Muldersdrift described in chapter 7—72 percent said life was better now. And in qualitative responses, overwhelmingly, citizens pointed to a lack of jobs and the fact that jobs were easier to get under Apartheid as reasons for selecting life was better “then.” Higher-income Blacks looked at the present more favorably than those with lower incomes. And those with an electric connection, a flush toilet in their home, and/or piped water were more likely to report that life was better now than before. The more service delivery problems people experienced, and the more they felt unsafe in their neighborhood, the more likely they were to reflect favorably on the past. While the South African government had made enormous progress in delivering basic services to millions more people than under Apartheid, millions were still waiting, and were clearly frustrated.
Nonetheless, material conditions were not good predictors of ANC support among Blacks in Mogale City. For example, the same proportion of those with jobs and formal houses supported the ANC as was the case for those who lacked both (about 68 percent). Looking at actual levels of and shifts in voter support for the ANC, the picture was more mixed when considering levels of service provision and the degree of expressed concerns about service problems. In short, it was not necessarily the case that those whose lives materially improved under ANC government were the ones rewarding them with their votes relative to the rest.11
Far and away, the strongest predictor of citizen responses to the question about quality of life was how individuals reported being treated by others: by members of other race groups and by government, as well as their optimism about the viability of a rainbow nation. For Blacks who said they were treated better now by Whites compared to under Apartheid, 63 percent said life was better now. By contrast, among those who said they have been treated the same or worse by Whites, less than 19 percent said their lives were better now. (And a similar pattern holds among Whites.) Moreover, I found that Blacks were much more likely to support the ANC when they reported being treated better by members of other race groups (81 percent versus 57 percent for those who said they were treated worse).
Indeed, in their more open-ended responses in which I asked respondents to elaborate on their quality-of-life concerns, many talked about the very types of race relations that the three pastors emphasized in our conversation over coffee, which I described in chapter 8. For example, a forty-four-year-old Black man talked about the present relative to the past: “Before, there were two doors in one shop for Whites and Blacks and my uncle once got beaten up for using a White door. We were not allowed to walk in the street after 19h00 [7 p.m.]. If found in the street I would be asked three questions like why aren’t you at school, work, [or] jail.” A seventy-six-year-old Black woman reflected on the question in terms of greater equality of opportunity: “Today’s life is good, we are free, we can do business freely without White people taking our stuff. We have freedom of education and we can attend school with White people.” It is not obvious why some respondents feel more respected by people from other race groups within the same geographic location. Self-reports of interracial contact or interracial friendships were themselves not predictive of how citizens described treatment by members of other race groups, nor were factors such as education, wealth, or the demographics of one’s ward.
Nonetheless, it is clear that how people view the “big picture” of post-Apartheid democracy and reconciliation is very much colored by or at least predicted by their own sense of everyday treatment by government authorities and by other citizens, especially across the racial divide. The likelihood that citizens in diverse societies will experience democratic government as successful may be strongly affected by empathy for, respectful treatment by, and fellow-feeling with the “other.”12 This ought to serve as a strong reminder for political leaders of the value citizens place on dignified treatment.
Of the Same Cloth: South Africa and the United States
For Americans reflecting on our own elections and the factors that drive vote choices, it’s hard to avoid seeing parallels with the 2019 South African contest. Race, material conditions, and the role of views of the other are all similarly highly predictive of vote choices.13
I decided to write this book about South Africa, but admittedly, the contemporary and historical United States has loomed large as a basis for comparison. While South Africa’s Apartheid system of race relations and its precursors were more thoroughgoing, America’s long history of slavery, segregation, and other formal and informal systems of race-based discrimination is also quite profound. And although formal discriminatory structures were dismantled in both countries, informal forms of racism persist, and their legacies remain strong and almost ubiquitous.
Any attempt at comparison bumps up against certain key differences between the countries, including in terms of racial demographics: throughout its history until the present, the United States has been a majority White country (even Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana are all majority White, and less than 40 percent of residents are African American). In the years after the U.S. Civil War and the end of slavery, the treatment of African Americans varied by region to a greater extent than regional variation in the implementation of Apartheid: in the American South, where most Blacks live, a form of segregation that is frequently compared with South African Apartheid persisted. The dawn of America’s multiracial experiment came thirty years earlier than South Africa’s, with the promulgation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed race-based segregation and promoted various forms of integration. As in South Africa, the civil rights era was met with a mixed response from within society, and the mere imperative to change did not translate into transformation. This is apparent today, more than fifty years later, and certainly was true in the twenty to twenty-five years after the Civil Rights Act.14
In fact, a 1985 New York Times article titled “The Races in Mississippi: Old Order and New” might just as well have been a story about present-day Mogale City. It highlighted that a local Black newspaper, the Jackson Advocate, printed an article announcing that the state had sworn in the first Black member of the state supreme court next to an article titled “Cross Burned—Youth Abducted and Beaten in Strife-Torn Durant.” The Times article juxtaposed substantial political gains against slow progress in terms of relationships and contact between the races.
The fact that many people, Blacks and Whites, died so that Blacks could use a restroom in a public place or walk through the front door of a restaurant and be served is somewhat lost, or at least blurred, by the amount of change.
“It’s so different from what it was that for people who’ve never experienced the other, it’s just hard to realize what has changed,” observed Frank E. Smith, who represented Mississippi in Congress for 11 years.15
Similarly, Whites and Blacks offered divergent recollections of the past:
The lynchings of Blacks and denials of basic rights are part of the legacy of the state that, by far, was considered by almost all Blacks as the very toughest in the South, racism at its worst. But to many White Southerners at the time, there was nothing wrong with segregation of the races; as a matter of fact, they believed it was wrong, even immoral, for Blacks and Whites to live together, go to the same schools, socialize and marry.
On politics, race remained a critical predictor of how individuals would vote: “Whites won’t vote for a Black candidate,” one politician observed.
And on frustration among Blacks with not being able to lead a better life even two decades after the legal end of segregation:
Many Blacks live in two- to four-room wooden shacks with tin roofs and cardboard or plastic nailed up to windows that have no panes.
Only 14 percent of Tunica’s Blacks over the age of 25 have high school educations: the first high school for Blacks was not opened until 1952.
Sugar Ditch Alley, a Black settlement, takes its name from a one-and-a-half-mile ditch running behind the shacks. It is there that the residents dump their human waste, for there are no indoor toilets. They may also have to walk several houses away to obtain water from an outdoor hydrant.
When Americans elected the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama, in 2008, that marked a truly significant step toward redressing this history of indignities. Yet just eight years later, although more Americans voted for his opponent, Donald Trump won the election for the White House. It was eerily reminiscent of the 1948 election in South Africa, when the National Party got to take power, despite failing to win the most votes. Trump’s diatribes against people of color, foreigners, and even Africans bore more than a passing resemblance to the Nats’ fear-mongering around a “Black Peril,” and even to Paul Kruger’s White nativist orientation. The 2016 election in the United States reflected a deep lack of consensus among White Americans about our own journey toward racial integration. Moreover, despite its symbolic importance, Obama’s presidency, let alone several decades of post–civil rights politics, did not erase the racial disparities remaining in just about every dimension of American life: in terms of job opportunities, educational opportunities and attainment, life expectancies, health care and health outcomes, where people live, and who has political and economic power. As is now well known, African American men face a disturbingly high rate of incarceration and are routinely unfairly treated by the police throughout the country. Repeated indignities have fueled a movement, Black Lives Matter, whose core claim centers around a lack of equal respect for the dignity of Black people. Not surprisingly, the movement resonated in South Africa as well.
Both in America and in South Africa, political resistance and democratic politics have marked many important advances for greater social justice. Looking at the present from the perspective of the segregationist American South circa 1960 or Apartheid South Africa in 1980, there’s no denying that much has changed for the better.
And yet, when seen together, the history of these two countries demonstrates that institutionalized White supremacy dies hard, and their respective economies and societies continue to be defined by race-based disparities, high levels of prejudice, and conflict. Unfortunately, cycles of reproducing inequality in the form of various intergenerational transfers are extraordinarily difficult to break. Healthy, wealthy, and well-educated parents routinely transfer all of these outcomes to their children through their home environments, passing on not just assets but also human capital and social networks. The material and social-psychological legacies of past indignities are both strong and self-reinforcing, presenting perpetual new challenges in the quest for dignified development through democratic practice.
We can and should acknowledge serious and persistent shortcomings and aspire for democracy to work better in both places. It is also important to consider the alternatives. As just a few examples, the catastrophic and recent plight of the Uighurs in China,16 the Rohingya in Myanmar,17 and perpetual repression in Rwanda18 all reflect what can happen to ethnic minorities and competitors in the absence of the light and protections associated with well-institutionalized democratic rule. The government assault on human rights in the non-democracies of China and Russia, including in the form of violent repression of critics,19 has been without parallel in contemporary America or South Africa.
Lessons for and about Democracy and Dignified Development
Are there lessons to be learned—even if more modest ones—from South Africa’s bold political experiment to launch democracy? The challenges the country faced in the early 1990s, of a racially divided and highly unequal society, were extreme but not entirely unique. Countries around the world are simultaneously becoming more diverse and more unequal, and those conditions have frequently given rise to exclusionary and populist authoritarian tendencies. How might such polities fare under more robust democratic rules?
Focusing on the history of one country, it’s hard to know whether democratic practice actually caused the outcomes that followed. Was it any particular democratic institution or episode? Or a combination? Would such results hold in a different context? A case study like the one I’ve carried out here is not well designed to answer any of those questions adequately because so many changes have unfolded simultaneously.
Rather, the value of the story I’ve told here—about the development of multiracial democracy in South Africa for twenty-five years after Apartheid—is more heuristic: it helps to demonstrate what is possible and plausible, including to challenge the notion that some groups simply can’t coexist or co-govern—that “ancient hatreds” will always stand in the way. And it affords the opportunity to discuss what is valuable and desirable for the good life. Others will surely disagree with my particular calculations of what went right and what wrong, and the relative import of both—but my goal has been simply to consider the record more deliberately. Looking at this past quarter century in light of South Africa’s history, patterns in other countries, and in Mogale City in particular suggests further reflection about three key areas: democratic practice, the forging of political communities, and the role government should play in helping people fulfill their aspirations for a better life. I cannot, from this study, say that the introduction or consolidation of democracy will lead to dignified development with any particular likelihood. Democratic institutions are certainly not sufficient for this outcome. Rather, I do think they are necessary. To feel truly empowered and autonomous, citizens require robust opportunities to participate in the selection of leaders and to influence policy without fear of repression.
For example, Israel is one of many divided societies that continues to face existential dilemmas around who should be included, who excluded, and on what basis, and the South African experience is surely relevant. Israel had a “Mandela–De Klerk” dynamic in the form of Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, Nobel Prize winners, who signed an accord for Palestinian self-rule just days after Mandela’s election in 1994. Their negotiations were toward a “two-state” solution, but the settlement was undone by aggressions and pullbacks on both sides and, notably, the assassination of Rabin in 1995 by an Israeli extremist who resented the peace accords. While reminiscent of Chris Hani’s assassination, in the Israeli case, the murder derailed the negotiations, and after many years of repeated attempts, one noted scholar of Israeli politics concluded that the “two-state solution” appeared largely untenable.20
Maps of the Middle East, which carve out strangely shaped Palestinian territories with restrictive borders in the middle of Israel, are powerfully reminiscent of South Africa’s homeland structures, especially as the conditions within them are largely deplorable relative to the largely prosperous country that surrounds. Indeed, the term “Apartheid” has often been used to describe the nature of power and authority in Israel, even though it is met by many with grave consternation given the connotations. For many White South Africans who observe the Israeli situation, and speak despairingly of what befell their own country, they describe the South African case more as a warning rather than as a model for emulation. And such difference of interpretation is one of the main reasons I wrote this book: we need to understand what South Africa is a “case of.” Perfect? No. Nonetheless, quite successful given the conditions and the very possible alternatives, especially if one focuses on the most vulnerable segments of society.
For Jews and Arabs who find it difficult to fathom a peaceful solution in which they coexist in a single democratic order, South Africa offers one critical lesson: former enemies can, in fact, live and govern relatively peacefully and productively, within the span of a generation. While it is difficult to parse out which of South Africa’s democratic institutions had what particular effects on politics and society, two general principles stand out: multiple opportunities for participation and the norm of proportionality.
With respect to the first, I am reminded that on election day, many repeated the incantation, “You can’t complain if you don’t vote.” That might imply that voters are the biggest complainers. In fact, political participation was associated with more positive views of life in South Africa—and it’s hard to know whether contentedness causes political participation or the reverse. As it is in other countries, political participation is important. Because of the staggered approach to national/provincial elections and local elections, the longest period that South Africans wait between elections is three years. Moreover, high-density local governments that blanket municipalities with ward councillors and ward committees alongside a still strong and active civil society offer robust opportunities to participate, at least in urban areas. Where people participate and where political competition is high, political parties have been more responsive. While it has not been a focus of this book, democratic practice in rural areas, especially those co-governed by traditional leaders, remains underdeveloped, and with little in the way of interparty competition.21
I am also largely persuaded that the norm of proportionality, including the specific electoral institution of proportional representation—rather than a “winner-take-all” system like we have in the United States—was the right choice for South Africa. In a diverse and divided society, proportionality has offered important recognition to a wide range of people according to their identities and ideas about how government should be run. The system has also kept minority elites engaged in politics in a meaningful way, realistically keeping their hopes alive of influencing policies and key outcomes, even without large numbers of supporters. Proportionality has allowed citizens to see themselves represented in and thus to become more attached to the government. And it has opened up space for new parties, born of new ideas, to emerge, and this has contributed to a more dynamic democratic environment.
Soon enough, such a system may reveal its limits. If and when the ANC is no longer able to capture a majority of the voters, and if the country is governed through coalitions, frustrations could ensue, just as they did in Mogale City following the 2016 local election. Optimistically, disparate elites could engage in workable compromise to the benefit of all. However, frustrating polarization could breed paralysis and/or potentially induce the type of opaque manipulation the ANC used to wrest control of the municipality. The ability to weather such political storms may depend on the degree to which political elites and ordinary citizens can find common ground in joint projects and a sense of shared purpose and not view the political arena as a zero-sum game. In short, formal institutions will never be enough to hold South Africa together—there must also be elite and citizen goodwill.
Along these lines, the post-Apartheid “experiment” was not just about the practice of democratic politics but also about reinventing a society that had been divided by deliberate design. As in the contemporary United States, a key challenge is how to address the indignities of the past without reinforcing and reproducing the sense of deep division and difference that bred such practices in the first place.
The “rainbow nation” was one solution for overcoming racial divide. Perhaps it was too hokey, too contrived to be fully embraced in a lasting manner, especially when intergroup inequalities remain so stark. Yet, all national myths are aspirational and, by design, unnuanced. Moreover, it’s difficult to discount the value that this particular idea played during the period of political transition in the mid-1990s. Echoing that early period, in November 2019, South Africa’s rugby team claimed a World Cup victory; and on that occasion, the team was more racially diverse and, for the first time, led by a Black man—Siya Kolisi—who was also outspoken in promoting an optimistic, “keep dreaming” message. The win garnered lots of favorable news coverage and offered a symbolic reminder of what the country was becoming and still could be.
Could the idea stick? Not everyone was convinced. As a columnist for the largest Black newspaper, the Sowetan, argued, “Winning [the] rugby world cup doesn’t mean we’re together.”22 Nonetheless, the expressed sentiments surrounding the 2019 World Cup revealed that there remains an appetite and possibility for nation-building and the politically useful notion that “we are in this together.”
Unfortunately, the development of a sense of “us” is too often built upon exclusionary and intolerant perspectives concerning who is not, or who is “them.” While it would be naive on a number of levels to suggest that fully open borders are the solution, like the United States, South Africa must square the desire to enforce such boundaries with an approach that also recognizes the dignity of foreign nationals. A cursory glance at history reminds us that many of those today seen as “foreigners” are deeply rooted in the country’s history, including having jointly suffered from the indignities of White supremacy.
Relatedly, it’s worth asking whether a recently liberated people, facing significant disparities in income, wealth, and services, should really focus their attention on issues of symbolic recognition. Do statues and street and place names really matter? The color and gender of political representatives? In a recent book and related writing, Francis Fukuyama has argued that the quest for recognition can displace the more “important” political project of material advance and equitable development.23
I think Fukuyama’s argument underappreciates the quest for such recognition not simply as an end in itself but as a means for fostering efficacious and involved citizens. A sense of identity and pride are important foundations for the types of deliberate actions that breed prosperity. When people feel devalued, they are not likely to be contributing members of the community. I am not suggesting that every form of recognition is valuable or consequential, but following centuries of indignities, these are more than simply hollow symbols. They provide daily reminders of who and what are valued by their democratic society.
The analyses presented throughout this book also raise the question of what role government ought to play in the economy and society in the future. To the extent that South African citizens still have a large reservoir of unmet wants and needs, they must decide whether those are best addressed through direct government action, privately, or in some combination. The global record of state-planned economies is simply too dismal to contemplate as a comprehensive solution, and the South African government has already demonstrated its limited capacity even in delivering basic services. Nonetheless, the rights orientation of the constitution has usefully enshrined a role for government to protect a fundamental respect for human dignity, both in terms of minimum standards for material living conditions and for treatment by government itself and other citizens. I admit that, like many, I was initially skeptical of the heavy rights orientation of the South African constitution when I first learned of all that was protected. How could you “guarantee” all of these social and economic benefits? I imagined that it would amount to a plethora of unfulfilled promises. And yet in practice, the language and ethos of rights have proven quite central in changing the politics of inequality in South Africa, highlighting that the previously invisible ways in which people were excluded from full participation in society were no longer acceptable. A rights orientation opened up a critical discussion of what it means to be fully human: Should free health care be a right? Free primary education? Free university education? Quality education? Access to the internet? While there is no universally accepted bundle of goods that constitutes a human minimum, and clearly, context matters, a rights orientation offers a platform for the least well-off in unequal societies, and their allies, to make strong claims to direct public resources their way in search of a more just distribution.
Overcoming Cynicism
There’s no denying that democracy remains fragile and messy in Mogale City and in South Africa.
If the political order were to go up in flames, I would be crestfallen but not wholly surprised. From the vantage point of just over a quarter century since the end of Apartheid, it would be sheer hubris to assume that a relatively peaceful multiparty democracy will last forever. The multitude of challenges the country still faces could ultimately overwhelm the still emerging political order. However, if it does come apart, it will be one of the great tragedies of the early twenty-first century, because South Africa’s democratic order is surely one of the great accomplishments of the late twentieth.
That so much is left to be done to achieve a just and prosperous society does not mean that democratic government is to blame or that much would be better under a different system, tempting as it is to wonder aloud about such options. In many ways, South Africa is just muddling along, but that in and of itself is pretty remarkable in the wake of the legacies it inherited. Moreover, in just twenty-five years the country went from laggard to leader on multiple dimensions. So much that was once thought impossible is now taken for granted.
As I highlighted in chapter 3, and have shown throughout this book, one of the hallmark traits of democratic practice is the public and vociferous airing of grievances about the status quo. This is healthy and drives change. And yet when we combine this behavior with a tendency toward negativity bias, sentiment can turn cynical. I have tried to offer a reality check.
Proponents of democracy’s virtues have never enjoyed a period of unwavering support for their theories. History has always generated cases of democracies gone bad and of authoritarian regimes that managed to succeed in various ways. The present period is a particularly difficult one for democracies around the world. When protesters took to the streets in countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa during the 2010s, marking a period that came to be known as the “Arab Spring,” they appeared to be paving the way for a more democratic order in the world’s most autocratic region. Among their many concerns were government corruption, lack of jobs, and economic inequality. And yet, a decade later, liberal democracy has completely failed to take root. Established democracies in every world region have come under pressure from those seeking to gain or to hold onto power through illiberal tactics, circumventing democratic procedures.
In this context, South Africa needs to be understood as the largely successful case that it is, and it is fair to say that democracy saved South Africa from a fate that could have been quite disastrous given where the country was headed. The fact that it can be largely successful here does not tell us that it will work the same way everywhere, but it provides an important heuristic for what’s possible and lessons for plural societies.
Was this just a fluke of history? To be certain, following the wave of multiparty elections endeavored mostly during the decade of the 1990s, very few African countries developed robust democratic institutions and practices.24 And yet, those that did offer analogous lessons to what I found in South Africa. Citizens of Cape Verde, Ghana, Botswana, Benin, Senegal, Namibia, and others have benefited from democratic practice relative to the largely disastrous experience of authoritarian rule in neighboring countries on the continent. The politics and policies of these other African democracies are similarly imperfect, and their domestic critics similarly numerous and vociferous. Nonetheless, they also have much to share in terms of the virtues of political freedom, including with respect to dignified treatment, that were previously available only to small minorities.
Progress requires the constant readjustment and ratcheting of hopes and dreams. In practice, especially within democratic systems, this means never accepting the status quo as fully satisfactory, and at least rhetorically dismissing the past and the present as unacceptable. But sometimes progress must be measured and appreciated. For generations, Black South Africans, from Sol Plaatje to Desmond Tutu to Chris Hani to Nelson Mandela, as well as the freedom fighters in Munsieville, Kagiso, and beyond, all labored to free themselves and their society from the shackles of institutionalized White supremacy and Apartheid. And they succeeded. When the Congress of the People gathered to read the Freedom Charter in 1955, few South Africans or outside observers would have predicted a day when so many of their aspirations would be largely fulfilled: irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, or disability, South Africans of 2019 were all clearly citizens, not subjects. Political leaders had to come to them asking for their votes, appealing to their sense of what was right and fair.
Democracy in South Africa is working: it is becoming more competitive; people are living better lives with more dignity; citizens are advancing their interests in a range of democratic channels—through the vote, in the media, in citizen campaigns, in the courts, and in their growing confidence of what it means to be a democratic citizen. Their story leaves me hopeful.