South Africa just had its most hopeful elections ever, by Andrew Kenny

The general election of April 1994, which brought full democracy,… was … a foregone conclusion — the black majority voted for the ANC, as expected. The local elections this month were different and immensely hopeful.

There has been a large vote against the ruling party, the ANC, bringing an end to the great curse of post-colonial Africa under which the people keep voting for the ‘liberation’ party however corrupt and incompetent it is. The ANC still won 54 per cent of the votes, but this is the first time its share has fallen below 60 per cent.

Better still, South African voting has ceased to be entirely dictated by race. … The official racial composition of South Africa today is as follows. Black African: 81 per cent. Coloured: 9 per cent. White: 8 per cent. Asian: 2 per cent.

Until now, a map of voting results has looked like a racial census, with all white and brown people voting one way and all black people another. This has changed. In three of South Africa’s most important cities, … whites and blacks together voted in large numbers against the ANC.

The ANC are explicitly racist:

The ANC has continued apartheid’s obsession with racial policies, including compulsory race classification.

It has instituted ‘affirmative action’, where jobs are given on race rather than merit, and ‘demographic representivity’, where, if 80 per cent of the population is black, 80 per cent of doctors should be black. Of course nobody believes in affirmative action for the services they receive, only for the services other people receive.

hat-tip Stephen Neil