JOHANNESBURG — When 360,000 gold and coal miners walked off the job in South Africa in 1987, protesting the poor pay and grim working conditions of apartheid-era mines, a charismatic young man named Cyril Ramaphosa, the firebrand leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, led the charge.

But as the police opened fire on workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine two weeks ago, killing 34 people, Mr. Ramaphosa, now a multimillionaire business tycoon and senior leader of the governing African National Congress, found himself in a very different position: on the board of the company the workers were striking against, the London-based Lonmin.

Mr. Ramaphosa’s journey from hunted labor activist to industry titan and perennial presidential contender is an emblem of South Africa’s spectacular transition from brutally enforced white minority rule to a multiracial democracy where, in theory at least, anyone with talent has a chance to succeed.

But the low pay and tin-walled hovels of the miners who went on strike at Lonmin’s mine — conditions in many ways reminiscent of the ones faced by the miners Mr. Ramaphosa led — starkly demonstrate the failure of the A.N.C. to deliver its own slogan: “A better life for all.”