South Africa's ruling African National Congress has an image problem. Increasingly, younger generations of voters are losing interest. For them, the ANC just isn't as attractive as it used to be. After 14 years in power, the party no longer cuts a youthful figure on the nation's political landscape, and young people say the party has let itself go.
Call it a 14-year itch, or maybe it's a seven-year itch that's now a full-blown rash. Either way, the ANC isn't the draw it once was. The party still has millions of members, but increasingly, black voters who would ordinarily be seen as ANC supporters are disengaged from politics. They are South Africa's 20-, 30- and 40-somethings, and they're restless. Some haven't seen their luck change since the ANC hastened the end of apartheid in 1994.
Others, like 35-year-old Willem Khabele, simply aren't buying what the party has to say anymore.
"People like me — we are off from politics," Khabele says.
Empty Promises From The ANC
Khabele is a partner in a recording studio called Solid Beats that has already had some hits on the radio. He says he walked into freedom with the ANC at the fall of apartheid in 1994, and he loves Nelson Mandela as much as the next guy. But Khabele says that neither the ANC nor the government the party controls has done much for him lately. Most specifically, he says, the Ministry of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology has disappointed Solid Beats time and again, encouraging the studio to apply for grants and work projects that never materialized.
"We wanted change," Khabele says. "The ANC came with a lot of promises and all the promises were never delivered."
So everything in his dim little studio has been hard won — the rickety furniture, the blinking halogen lights no bigger than raindrops, the carpet that hides stretches where there is no floor.
Khabele says he stopped voting years ago and he has no plans to vote next year, when South Africa is expected to get a new president.
By virtue of the ANC's overwhelming majority in Parliament, the party has the power to select the nation's next head of state, but as far as Khabele is concerned, the party's over.
"When you put all your hopes in something and you expect the people you believed in to help you, it's like betrayal," Khabele says.
Solid Beats has two other partners who are more or less in sync. One is 23 years old and says he has never voted and has no plans to. The other won't even discuss politics — he says he's only about music these days.
Squatting In Soweto
Soweto is a big place. It's not unlike the bustling, segregated urban neighborhoods that were buttressed by Jim Crow laws in the U.S., except Soweto is much bigger. Some areas are high society and some low. Some folks are high-stepping into luxury cars and hanging out at the mall; some folks are hoofing it. There's a street here where two Nobel Peace Prize winners live, and others where squatters like Benjamin Komako live.
Komako used to be a member of the ANC and he thought he'd be living in a big house by now.
"I was expecting a lot of things in my life to change — that we'd get big houses, better yards, better street services, better services," Komako says.
Komako moved to the squatter's camp when he was 32 years old. He is now 43 and supports three kids and a wife by handing out fliers for local businesses — a job that pays enough to keep him right on squatting. On his street — and on his breath at 11 a.m. — is the distinct smell of alcohol mixed with defeat. Komako says he had better work during apartheid.
"You'd move from one company to another company," Komako says. "There was no problem getting jobs and whatever. For now, it's a task and a hassle to get a job."
Conflicted Feelings
It's not that the ANC has done anything to Komako personally. What really rankles him is that it has been so impervious to him. Komako says he has no plans to rejoin the ANC, but he does like the party's new president, Jacob Zuma.
Uviwe Mangweni, a college student in Johannesburg, doesn't think much of Zuma, and she won't be joining the party either. She says her mother nearly cried when Thabo Mbeki resigned as head of state last month, but her father supports an opposition party.
"He feels indifferent, almost delighted that the ANC is kind of falling into pieces," Mangweni says.
Sitting in a suburban garden outside the city, Mangweni says there is a traceable ethnic divide between ANC members who support Zuma and those who support Mbeki. Zuma is Zulu and Mbeki is Xhosa. Mangweni, who is Xhosa, too, says that ethnic tensions within the party have now made ordinary South Africans more openly hostile to one another.
"On an everyday level, there are small subtleties," Mangweni says. "If the taxi driver is Zulu and I try to communicate in Xhosa, there will be tension. They will tend to react in a negative way. It happens quite a bit. You know, shouting at you, or they'll make your journey more difficult somehow. And you can't really complain. Because, you know, who are you going to complain to?"
Mangweni says she'll cast her first vote ever in elections next year.
"And I'm hearing a lot of my friends saying that they're not even interested in voting," she says. "And I'm hearing others say that actually they are going to vote specifically for an alternative to the ANC."
Mangweni says that deep down in their bones, nearly all black South Africans appreciate what the ANC has done to make freedom possible. But many young people want to see some of the stuffing taken out of the party so that it no longer has the final say over the Parliament, the government and the constitution.
Mangweni says at first she would vote for an opposition party — then she physically cringed at the notion, the way people do when they hear a human bone break.
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