South Africa’s Political Futures

RARELY HAS A COUNTRY SO DIVIDED POLITICAL ANALYSTS AS contemporary South Africa. Ever since R. W. Johnson famously enquired ‘How long will South Africa survive?’,1 a procession of doom-mongers has viewed its political trajectory through the lenses of post-colonial African decline, seeing its carefully managed ‘transition to democracy’ as just one more step along the road to civil war, rampant tribalism, and a one-party state. Well-wishers saw the new South Africa through quite different eyes, as a rainbow-coloured adventure bus unshackled by the ‘miracle’ of transition from the economic and social chains of apartheid. Many of the liberation movement’s supporters even saw the African National Congress (ANC) as the glorious locomotive of continental renaissance, pulling its peoples into the African century