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[We're especially pleased to present Dave Renton's report from the recent elections in South Africa. Regular readers will remember that Palash Davé covered the historic elections of 1994 for the original paper version of The Voice of the Turtle #4 with his classic article, "Palash Liberates an Entire Continent" -- Ed.]

The elections that took place in South Africa were one of the most curious contests in democratic history. The ruling African National Congress received just under 67 percent of the vote, an amazing success. People queued for two miles to take part in the election. Thabo Mbeki the president-elect was feted wherever he went. Where before people had sung 'Nel-son, Nel-son', now they learned the new tune, 'Tha-bo, Tha-bo'. Never before has an unpopular party done so well in a fair vote. One of the themes of this article will be that the ANC has lost ground and has demoralised many of its own supporters. Yet outside South Africa, few people would accept that the ANC is anything other than a model government. In Europe and America, South Africa is regarded as a modern miracle, the 'rainbow nation', a society finally at peace with itself. For reasons of goodwill, because we detest racism, because we want South Africa to work, we outsiders have an impression in our heads, which has little in common with South Africa itself.

I lived and worked in South Africa for two months this year, based in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape. It may well be that my perceptions were distorted by my experience of living among people who had put the most hope in an ANC government. I am also aware of the dangers of giving succour to the South African opposition, which in all its forms remains based on individuals who built their career under apartheid. Yet the fact remains that the ANC supporters I met, expressed without exception regret and disappointment and a sense of loss.

The best sign of this mood of disenchantment was in the low voter registration. In mid-February, the government claimed that just 50 per cent of eligible adults had registered. After four weeks of empty polling stations and frantic ministerial appeals the claimed figure rose to 75 per cent. In Grahamstown, the claimed number was 65 per cent. Even this low figure was based on an old apartheid census, and the majority of the population did not vote.

Mfundo lives in a one-room shack on the township in Grahamstown East. His school life was dominated by mass stay-aways and consumer boycotts. I asked him why the registration was so low. 'I think it's because of disillusionment. People don't see the need to vote for any party, even any other party, it would just do the same thing. In rural areas, for the people who have to travel so far just to go to school, the right to vote has become meaningless.' Five years ago, Aneesa was the national president of SASCO, the student wing of the ANC. This time round she seemed utterly depressed, 'The ANC has turned on the townships, on its activists...'

Unlike in America, where voter indifference has become one of the clichés of the political process, it matters if ordinary South Africans do not see a need to vote. The identity of today's South Africa is derived from the extraordinary enthusiasm that met the 1994 elections. In the run up to those first elections, the old white rulers engineered hundreds of political murders, especially in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Apartheid politicians predicted that the elections would lead to mass anarchy and civil war. Even liberal whites were seen stocking up with food to deal with the expected emergency. In some houses you can still see the tins of tuna that people had stored in their garage. Yet when the elections came, there was an amazing sense of jubilation. Blacks and whites met and talked in the election queues. In some places people waited patiently, in others they danced. It felt like a peaceful revolution had taken place, and it was in this climate that the image of South Africa as the rainbow nation was born.

This remains the optimistic face that democratic South Africa presents to the outside world. When Nelson Mandela toured Brixton in 1997, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to welcome him. Those who came rightly saw Mandela as a living symbol of the victorious fight against racism, a sign that cynicism and despair need not triumph. Within South Africa, 'Madiba' is still universally loved. But attitudes to the government are different.

Sithembele hopes to work for the union federation COSATU. He describes the problems that the ANC faces. When I spoke to him, he readily admitted that Thabo Mbeki, Mandela's successor, does not have the same stature as his predecessor. 'People idealise our leader, but when he steps out of power, it is more difficult. Mbeki is an intellectual, he will be a good leader. But he is not as popular as Madiba.' The ANC leadership still enjoys an enormous goodwill going back to the victorious fight against apartheid. But does the historic role of the party protect it from serious criticism today?

The ANC government was clearly worried that the popular enthusiasm of 1994 has been lost. To counter the indifference of so many ordinary South Africans, it launched a massive publicity campaign to set forward what it sees as its achievements. The Government Communication and Information Service placed ads on television, radio and in the press. Indeed some of the statistics are impressive. 500 health clinics are being built each year. 4.9 million children now have access to food at primary school, 58 per cent of South African Homes now have electricity.

There can be no doubt that black working-class South Africans have made important gains over the past five years. For Michelle, a student at Rhodes University, the most important achievement of the government was the introduction of universal health care, 'You look among the mobile health units on the Eastern Cape. I've never seen such a unity, people working together.' In the townships the quality of the housing has improved, there is better access to water and electricity.

Yet when these gains are set against the enormous inequality and poverty that still shape South African society, it is hard to accept that the ANC has delivered. While the apartheid-era laws are now long dead, too many of the pressures of apartheid remain. Unemployment stands officially at around 30 per cent. In many towns and cities, it is far higher. In most (white) suburbs, unemployment is negligible, while in the (black) townships and especially in the old homelands, unemployment is often far higher. It is typical to meet families of seven or eight people kept by the remittance sent back from one workers' wage. Where there is no remittance, many people rely on pensions or begging.

The decisive test has always been housing. In 1994, the government promised that one million houses would be built in four years. Given that over 50 per cent of black South Africans live in temporary housing, including shacks, outbuildings and hostels, this figure was always far lower than it should have been. According to one estimate, 200,000 new houses a year are needed if the quality of housing is just to stand still. Yet the government has failed to deliver even this. Only 400,000 houses have been built in the five years since the last election.

There are also some ways in which the society is becoming less equal, and South Africa has actually been going backwards. South Africa has the world's fastest-growing incidence of HIV, and it is black Africans who are the first victims. One in five babies is born with the virus, and in most regions, one in five adults is now infected. Largely as a result of AIDS, South African life expectancy has fallen from a recent high of 65.4 years to 55.7 today.

Meanwhile, the imposition of tuition fees means that over the past four years access to university education has increasingly been limited to members of the middle classes. Many teachers reporting class sizes down by a third, year on year. Mandela's old university, Fort Hare is in crisis, with senior staff accused of corruption, and students and lecturers in occupation to demand that the administrators are removed. Many of the nine other former-black universities are also on the verge of collapse. In March, the Saturday Star newspaper asked whether South Africa really needs its 21 universities.

The Rainbow Nation shows painful signs of xenophobia. The Johannesburg police launch each week a new crackdown aimed against African refugees. These immigrants are widely blamed for the problems that the country faces. A new black-on-black racism expresses itself in the demeaning phrase for African immigrants, kwerkere. The Mail and Guardian recently revealed that Ayanda Moatshe, a member of the national softball team, had been arrested and detained four times in ten days, as a suspected illegal immigrant. Why had the police found her suspicious? Because her skin was black and she spoke English.

Many ordinary whites have also become disenchanted with the reconciliation process. A major complaint is taxation. Because South Africa has such high unemployment, the burden of taxation falls on a wide range of the working population. Incomes of 70,000 rand (7,000 pounds) are taxed at 48 per cent. Many white workers earn that wage or near it. For poor or working-class whites the prospect of equalisation is worrying. With talk of global recession in the air, nobody talks of bringing black wages up to a decent level, and achieving equality that way. The only likelihood is of an equalisation down, bringing everyone's wage together at the lowest level.

White fears quickly tip over into outright racism. Surveys of school children reveal more casual racist language than five years ago. At Vryburg High, a black student was suspended for attacking a white pupil. The black student claims that he was responding to racist abuse. Meanwhile, Vryburg's School Governors protect their head teacher, who openly refuses to teach black pupils.

Grahamstown is South Africa's Cambridge, a small town dominated by the large and liberal Rhodes University. In the town bookshop, a student spotted my English accent and told me about her friends at university in Britain. Soon, though, she was on more familiar ground, 'We used to have such a good radio service until 1994, when they took over. They have a different culture, they aren't as advanced as we are. They don't like the things we do.' I thought about the SABC programmes I have listened to, and the striking lack of African presenters. That evening, I went drinking with friends from the township. In two bars, white drinkers refused to be served alongside blacks. The regulars walked out, scowling as they went.

Over the past six months there have also been worrying echoes of the political violence of the early 1990s. In KwaZulu-Natal, Inkatha has begun to mobilise for secret military training. The National Intelligence Agency reports the presence of mobile training units in the province, with private security companies assisting in the formation of armed hit squads. The new Inkatha president of the region, Lionel Mtshali, has called for KwaZulu-Natal to secede from the rest of South Africa. The killings of the early 1990s were a product of two factors: the desire of a significant section of the state apparatus to destabilise black society, plus the awful poverty of KwaZulu-Natal, which gave Inkatha's conservative populism an appeal to its supporters. Although the institutional support for white racism has declined, it has not entirely gone away. Meanwhile, the continuing poverty of most South Africans guarantees Inkatha a continuing appeal.

After the last election, the ANC and Inkatha agreed to divide up the region, final voting figures were decided by negotiation, rather than a count. This time around, the ANC has invited Inkatha into a joint government. Deep tensions are accommodated, not solved.

The enormous problems that still shape South Africa can be seen clearly in the Xhosa-speaking Eastern Cape. This region provided many of the best known-faces of the liberation struggle, but now the area is clearly depressed. The Eastern Cape is predominantly rural, without any major industry, and there is a shortage of jobs. Ayanda works as a teacher in the Ciskei. I asked her if her school has computers, 'We don't even have water or electricity!' Rural poverty forces people into the cities. For the coming election, Grahamstown is treated as having a census population of 45,000, of which around 80 percent then have registered to vote. But the real figure is at least 150,000, and one survey put the population at 300,000. Official unemployment stands at 70 percent, and real unemployment is even higher. Poverty here is normal, and it creates depression and deference. The children begging call white people 'sir' or 'boss'.

Ludwe is another ANC member who grew up with the struggle. He dreams of winning a Mandela scholarship, and studying in England. One weekend, Thabo Mbeki was due to deliver a speech just 100 kilometres away, would he go? 'In the past, the ANC would have put on coaches, free transport. Now we have large posters telling us he will speak, but nobody can afford to go.' Things weren't always like this, I ventured. 'No', he said. 'Before the ANC and the SACP were unbanned, everything was decided by people, from the bottom up. Then after 1990, all the decisions were taken somewhere else.'

The government can still draw on enormous reserves of goodwill, but its reforms have not altered the brutal inequality that still shapes South African society. It is useful to ask what alternatives there are. The Pan-African Congress was long seen as a potential opposition to the ANC. Yet its nationalist politics have offered no real alternative. Its leaders centred their election campaign around a demand for the restoration of corporal punishment. As an organisation the PAC has been in the doldrums since it received just 1.24 per cent in the 1994 elections, and did little better this time around. A new party, the UDM, did well in the Eastern Cape. Yet its programme, 'to rebuild South Africa', remains woolly and unshaped, while the UDM's black leaders are tainted, having collaborated with the apartheid regime. Meanwhile, the old National Party is collapsing, and was eclipsed by the free-market Democratic Party, as the main 'white' voice. Yet even if the opposition parties were to combine, the result would not have one tenth of the moral stature which the ANC retains from the liberation struggle. The DP did not win even ten per cent of the vote.

The workers' movement is a more likely source of hope. In February, there were unofficial strikes by airport workers. In March, it was miners who walked out. The National Union of Miners, in particular, has begun to recruit white mine-workers. The union movement speaks a language in which class and not race is what matters. South Africa still has a huge and well-organised trade union movement, and one of the few remaining mass Communist Parties in the world.

There has been little sign of either distancing themselves from the ANC. The SACP, which dominates COSATU, has long provided the leading members of the ANC. It was the SACP which formulated the core ideas of the liberation movement, notably the 'two stage' strategy, which maintained that South Africa had to be liberated from internal colonialism before the left should even raise the possibility of fighting for socialism. Although the separation of workers' demands from national liberation came close to unravelling in the mid-1980s, the separation was held, and its success has contributed to shape the fate of the left today.

Yet there are also tensions within the SACP. At the 1998 ANC Conference, Thabo Mbeki launched a bitter attack on the party. He accused the SACP of undermining business prosperity. None of the many SACP ministers replied to his attack. Yet the speech itself was an important sign of the tensions within the governing alliance. If the ANC is going to govern for South African business, then it will need to take on the country's powerful trade unions. Even though the leadership of the SACP is unlikely to offer much resistance, it is hardly likely that the diverse membership of the party could support such attacks.

In this article, I have described the disenchantment that many ordinary South Africans already feel towards their government. Yet among the millions of black workers who voted for the ANC, there is the possibility of something different. While I am pessimistic about the future prospects of the South African state, I have no such pessimism in regards to the South African people. Ordinary Africans have repeatedly outdone the predictions of their political class. The struggle against apartheid was won in the townships, through mobilisation, mass strikes and popular pressure.

Hundreds of thousands of South Africans, black and white, took part in the struggle against apartheid. The leading activists who built the trade unions and the civics and the other organisations of struggle, are still alive. Some have been incorporated into the government, others have become cynical and demoralised, but many retain their independence. The possibility remains of a re-alignment among the large forces that are impatient for real change.