A minority of adult South Africans have just cast their votes for political parties few people trust. They did so to elect local governments that increasingly don’t work. There is a story to tell about why things got this way, a story many resist.

For the first 17 years of the democratic era two fortuitous circumstances sheltered SA from confronting its real character. The first was that apartheid’s fall was understood as a world-historical moment — the death, finally, of the last regime on earth where people still could not vote because of the colour of their skins...

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