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South Africa elections 2024: Can ANC overcome challenge from Zuma, DA, EFF and others? - BBC News South Africa elections 2024: Can ANC overcome challenge from Zuma, DA, EFF and others? - BBC News
(32 minutes later)
Barbara Plett Usher Farouk Chothia
BBC News, Soweto BBC News, Johannesburg
As in numerous other polling stations across South Africa, voting was delayed at a Soweto school located a short walk from where anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela used to live. At the height of the racist system of apartheid, only white people could sit on the benches of Joubert Park in Johannesburg.
People have been patient but it’s clear the political landscape for Mandela’s party, the governing African National Congress (ANC), is changing. Today only black people are sitting here, relaxing after voting in the marquees that have been set up for the election.
“We are excited that more parties have come on board,” says 50-year-old Thabiso Motea. “We don’t want just one party ruling.” It is a reminder of how South Africa has changed in the 30 years since the country’s last white ruler, FW de Klerk, handed power to Nelson Mandela.
Linda Malinda, 68, says casting her vote would make a change, and that she wants a lot of that. “Those days of apartheid are over. They will never come back. Now we are all equal,” Simon Mohale tells me.
“Most of our children they’ve gone into drugs because of frustration - they can’t get jobs, they can’t go to school, the money’s not there. Today I did not see a single white voter at the polling station here.
She says she is still planning to vote for the ANC, because “changing my vote will make things worse”. Almost all of them moved out of the area when apartheid collapsed while black people - who previously could not live here - moved in.
But 18-year-old Ntokoto Ngobeni was waiting to “vote out some people” and cast his first-ever ballot for the radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party. Mohale says:
Whatever the outcome of this election, it feels like it marks the end of an era. White people are still welcome here. We are one.”
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