What are we to make of the results of the 2014 South African elections? On one level, it was largely predictable: the ANC was always going to lose some support, but not enough to please the opposition…
Jacob Zuma’s ANC won the 2014 South African election with 62% of the vote, 3% down from 2009. Its nearest rival, the Democratic Alliance, won 22%, 6% up. And the newcomers, Julius Malema’s Economic Freedom…
On the surface, 2014 appears to represent “business as usual” for the landscape of South Africa’s electoral politics. The African National Congress (ANC) has secured a fifth straight victory in the latest…
The African National Congress drew a crowd of more than 100,000 supporters to its final election rally in Soweto at the weekend and there was a palpably jubilant mood at the rally as supporters predicted…
At the end of 2012, I published a deliberately surreal novel entitled Joseph Kony and the Titans of Zagreb. In it, using satire and magic realism, I tied together the corrupt destinies of figures on both…
South Africans will go to the polls on 7 May in what promises to be the country’s most interesting election since 1994. Commentators are already speculating (wildly, and without any reasonable evidence…
Over the past year, South Africa’s media have relished the excitement and hype around the emergence of two new political parties. Julius Malema, the expelled former leader of the ANC Youth League notorious…
The timing could not have been more poignant: as South African president Jacob Zuma announced to the world that Nelson Mandela, the father of his nation, had breathed his last, Mandela’s daughters, Zenani…
Chief Research Specialist in Democracy and Citizenship at the Human Science Research Council and a Research Fellow Centre for African Studies, University of the Free State