Zille's no madam

NEVER since the end of apartheid in 1994 has an election in South Africa been fought along such unashamedly racist lines. As elsewhere in the world, local government elections usually produce a yawn. But in the run-up to the municipal polls on May 18th, leaders of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), including President Jacob Zuma, played the race card remorselessly, in a bid to block the slow but steady rise of the Democratic Alliance (DA), led by a white woman, Helen Zille.

As an investigative journalist on the liberal Rand Daily Mail in the 1970s, it was Ms Zille who first exposed the apartheid government for lying about the murder in prison of Steve Biko, a Black Consciousness leader. Rewarded with death threats and obliged to resign her job, she became a leading light in the Black Sash, a white women's human-rights group. Given a suspended prison sentence for being in a black “group area” without a permit, she let her home be used as a safe house for anti-apartheid campaigners and in the turbulent 1980s was forced into hiding with her two-year-old son.

Yet she is often now vilified by the ANC and its allies as a racist “madam”. They have caricatured her as the boss of a Nazi-inspired white-supremacist party “hellbent on treating black people as subhuman” and on taking the country back to the apartheid days of racial division, inequality and oppression. The ANC told blacks who considered deserting the liberation party to vote for the DA that they were courting the wrath of the ancestors, would never get to heaven, and would hasten the demise of the ailing Nelson Mandela, the country's first black president, revered by both whites and blacks for his unwavering commitment to racial reconciliation and harmony.

In a country where 79% of the 50m-strong population are black, 9% white, another 9% coloured (mixed-race) and 3% of Indian or Asian descent, the still white-dominated but increasingly multiracial DA ended up doing rather well, increasing its support in every municipality it contested. Final election results gave it almost one in four of the votes cast (24%), up from 16% in the local polls five years ago.

For the first time it won an outright majority of votes to retain its control of Cape Town, the country's second-biggest city. And it mopped up virtually the entire minority vote nationwide. Though it won only 5% of the black vote, that was nevertheless a sharp improvement on the estimated 1% it took in the 2009 general election. One in five of its support base is now black.

But the vote leaves South Africa more racially divided. Despite the ANC's poor performance in local government—two-thirds of South Africans told pollsters they were unhappy with service delivery—the ruling party still gets the support of the vast majority of black voters, winning 62% of the overall vote in the latest local polls. Though four percentage points less than last time, this still leaves the ANC in control of all but a few dozen of the country's 284 municipalities, as well as eight of its nine provinces and the national government.

But the racist overtones of its campaign has left a nasty taste in many South African mouths, including those of some of its own supporters, who fear it marks the growing ascendancy of the party's “Africanist” faction.

For noisy populists such as Julius Malema, head of the ANC's Youth League, are no longer the only ones appealing to fears of racism. According to Trevor Manuel, the ANC's former finance minister, who is coloured (and may soon bid for the IMF's top job), “racism has infiltrated the highest echelons of government”. And beyond. It is becoming more acceptable for black South Africans to scorn and abuse whites openly as a racial group.

Though the ANC and its leaders continue to intone the mantra that South Africa belongs “to all its people, black and white”, as enshrined in the constitution, many members of minorities—Indians and coloureds, as well as whites—are beginning to have their doubts. Criticism of the government or the ANC is increasingly depicted as a racist slur. One ANC minister said that such criticism implied that “these darkies are incapable” of governing.