An EFF rally in Johannesburg (GUILLEM SARTORIO/AFP via Getty Images)

In 2021, at the age of 24, Chad Louw became South Africa’s youngest ever mayor. Then a member of the governing African National Congress party (ANC), Louw was elected in Oudtshoorn, a town in the Klein Karoo region of the Western Cape. This is a sparse, dusty world of open expanses, straight highways and dramatic mountain ranges. In the early 20th century, it supplied a global fashion for ostrich feathers, a boom period that endowed Oudtshoorn with a crop of stately colonial mansions known locally as ostrich palaces. Today, these buildings give the town a quaint character that sits uneasily amid the signs of poverty and unemployment.
Louw’s stint as mayor was short-lived, thanks to the fractious nature of municipal coalitions, but he remains active in politics. The son of a domestic worker and a warehouse worker, he belongs to a group known as the “coloureds”, whose mixed descent includes the Cape’s indigenous Khoisan people, Dutch settlers and Malay slaves brought to South Africa during the early colonial period. They share the language of the white Afrikaners who governed the country during apartheid, but under that regime endured severe discrimination similar to black South Africans. In my experience, few Westerners even know of the coloured people’s existence — and yet, they constitute about 8% of the country’s population, and more than 40% in the Western Cape.
When Louw joined the ANC in 2017, years of corruption and mismanagement had already tainted its image as the party of Mandela which ushered in democracy in 1994. But he believed the ANC was still the best vehicle for change. “There is more to do after 1994,” he tells me. “I wanted to implement what we were promised — not just freedom, which we have now, but economic freedom.” According to Louw, assistance has been too slow in reaching poverty-stricken rural areas. His own community of Dysselsdorp has recently benefited from a new housing project — but that was the first in 27 years. In particular, Louw wanted to fight on behalf of coloured people, many of whom feel neglected by the ANC. He even speaks of a “reverse apartheid”.
But in February this year, Louw left the ANC. The party, he says, has “become so toxic I don’t think that dream of economic freedom will be realised”. He found that political opportunities were distributed according to internal factions and personal relationships, while there was little interest in representing coloured people. Louw has now joined a small party called the Patriotic Alliance, which was established in 2013 and has been winning seats at municipal elections since 2016. The Patriotic Alliance has a strong emphasis on the interests of coloured people, though it says its populist stances on issues such as crime and illegal immigration resonate with ordinary South Africans more broadly. Louw, for instance, favours introducing the death penalty to counter South Africa’s severe problems with violent crime (the country recorded 27,500 murders last year), citing the precedent of El Salvador.
Louw’s story is emblematic of the ANC’s declining fortunes among young South Africans. Ahead of the national elections on Wednesday, which could well see the party losing its absolute majority for the first time, a survey of 18-to-24-year-olds showed a disturbing degree of disillusionment. Only 16% expressed optimism about the country’s future, the lowest score of the 16 African nations surveyed. Almost three quarters said South Africa is heading in the wrong direction, citing a bevy of grievances including government corruption, unemployment, the presence of undocumented migrants and problems with basic services such as water.
I have found a similar picture of frustration in my own conversations with members of the “born free” generation — those born after 1994, who have lived their entire lives under ANC rule. The electoral implications of these sentiments are still unclear, for they have contributed to pitifully low levels of voter registration and political engagement more broadly. But speaking to those who are engaged, the vision of national unity and gradual transformation which Mandela’s party stood for 30 years ago is now wearing dangerously thin. Among South Africa’s many different groups, there are few who do not feel in some way unjustly treated, and young people increasingly favour movements which speak to those injustices.
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