South Africa: the ANC loses its aura, and liberation remains unfinished

According to Courrier international, the results compiled after South Africa's 4 November municipal elections point to a sharp decline for the African National Congress (ANC), while the vote count continues. The magazine's headline speaks of an "aura of invincibility" that "has been broken": after years of decline, the domination of Nelson Mandela's party over the country is fading. That is the news. We know little more: the wire report gives no percentages, no names of who benefited, and no breakdown by municipality. It would be dishonest to invent what is missing.

What follows is our reading, not an established fact. A liberation party crumbling is not just a matter of electoral arithmetic. It raises the question Fanon and Cabral posed: what becomes of a national liberation that does not transform the social structure? Cabral saw a congenital weakness here: the indigenous petite bourgeoisie, better educated and closer to the colonial agents, takes the lead in the struggle against foreign domination because it is the first to feel the humiliation. But once the flag has changed, that stratum is tempted to settle into the inherited apparatus rather than dismantle it.

Nothing in this dispatch alone lets us say that this is the cause of the ANC's decline. But the hypothesis deserves to be raised. A movement that promised land, work and dignity, then co-existed with mining and financial capital and the neoliberal consensus, ends up offering its voters a flag, an anthem and municipal services that work poorly. Independence changed the sign above the door; the economy, for the most part, still looks outward, towards resource exports and capital markets. At the level of a municipality, this shows up in water, electricity and unemployment: exactly where the local state is meant to embody liberation.

There is another trap to avoid: cheering the fall without asking who gains from it. Popular discontent is legitimate, but it can be captured by forces that would offer less redistribution, or that would set the poor against one another, nationals against migrants, stable workers against precarious ones. When a narrative divides those at the bottom, always ask who benefits from the fracture.

The real lesson, if it holds, is not that liberation failed for lack of memory, but that a liberation without social transformation wears out. South African voters are not punishing Mandela; they are judging a record. The question is whether those who inherit the vote will have anything to offer beyond managing an economic order they have no intention of challenging. We will follow the full results to find out.