If South Africa held a general election tomorrow, which party would you vote for? That was the question I asked in a Twitter poll nine months ago. The options, limited to four by the poll’s format, were the ANC, the DA, the EFF and, somewhat stupidly, “Wouldn’t vote”. In retrospect I should have gone with “None of the above” rather than “Wouldn’t vote”, but, in my defence, this was never going to be an authoritative taking of the nation’s temperature: I’m a spinner of yarns, not a cruncher of numbers.Then there are the fantastic biases of Twitter itself. The vast majority of my followers are middle-class and urban. They follow me because (in general) they agree with or at least are entertained by my political views and class assumptions. I was, in other words, polling the inhabitants of one room inside an echo-chamber inside a silo. Not surprisingly, the results of my poll reflected that homogeneous demographic. Of the 1,149 people who voted, 71% opted for the DA, 16% voted EFF, 10%...

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