OpinionLydia Polgreen

Credit...Lindokuhle Sobekwa for The New York Times

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By Lydia Polgreen

Ms. Polgreen is an Opinion columnist. She reported across South Africa for 10 days for this column.

If you want to understand why the party that liberated South Africa from white rule lost its parliamentary majority in the election this week, you need to look no further than Beauty Mzingeli’s living room. The first time she cast a ballot, she could hardly sleep the night before.

“We were queuing by 4 in the morning,” she told me at her home in Khayelitsha, a township in the flatlands outside Cape Town. “We couldn’t believe that we were free, that finally our voices were going to be heard.”

That was 30 years ago, in the election in which she was one of millions of South Africans who voted the African National Congress and its leader, Nelson Mandela, into power, ushering in a new, multiracial democracy.

But at noon on Wednesday, Election Day, as I settled onto a sofa in her tidy bungalow, she confessed that she had not yet made up her mind about voting — she might, for the first time, she told me, cast a ballot for another party. Or maybe she might do the unthinkable and not vote at all.

“Politicians promise us everything,” she sighed. “But they don’t deliver. Why should I give them my vote?”

That a mighty party like the A.N.C., which delivered one of the most inspiring triumphs of the 20th century, could a few decades later be dismissed by a loyal voter as mere “politicians,” hardly worth a trek to the polls, may seem like a dispiriting outcome. The A.N.C. could be forced for the first time into an unwieldy coalition government with smaller parties that might not make for ideal allies.

This change of fortune naturally sparks fear and speculation: Has South Africa’s transition failed, and is the country headed for the kind of strife that has bedeviled most countries in the aftermath of liberation from colonization?

South Africa has long loomed large in the global imagination. It is a country that was born at a particularly potent time in human history, at the end of the Cold War, built in the aftermath of grave injustice and constituted under a set of egalitarian ideas. It was, and is, a new democracy as a symbol of what a new future might look like.

It is natural that 30 years later, we might ask for a verdict on how it has all gone, especially living as we do now, with sprawling wars on at least four continents, democracy in retreat in many places across the globe and a new conflagration in Israel and Palestine, a place that resonates with South Africa’s story.

I returned to South Africa ahead of the election for my first reporting trip since I was a correspondent here for The Times more than a decade ago. It can be hard to separate the outsize expectations the rest of the world places on South Africa with the ordinary experiences of South Africans. Yet I could not help feeling a sense of relief and even optimism at the prospect of the A.N.C. being humbled at the polls and being forced to compete, openly and vigorously, for the votes of South Africans who have, for understandable reasons, given the party a very long rope.

In 2011, the year I moved to South Africa, people were evenly split on whether the country was going in the right direction, according to the Afrobarometer survey. Last month in the Afrobarometer survey, 85 percent agreed the country is headed in the wrong direction.

That’s for good reason. Economic growth has stalled, and a staggering 32.9 percent of the working population is jobless. The government can’t seem to keep the lights on. Political corruption is endemic and rapacious. Violent crime wracks many areas, especially in the townships and informal settlements where poor people live. The country’s roads, bridges and ports — once vaunted as the continent’s best — are crumbling. Inequality between Black and white people, an intentional feature of the apartheid state, has widened in recent decades, within the Black community itself as a new Black elite with close ties to the government and big business has mushroomed.

Mzingeli did not need this litany. She is living it. The first decade after the end of apartheid was a euphoric period: The global political and economic conditions favored the new South Africa, and her own prospects soared. After years of working as a housekeeper, she was able to go back to school 19 years ago to become a nurse, a lifelong dream.

But she has watched with dismay as her children’s prospects........

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