Post polls, a strange, stunned silence

On Wednesday, South Africa’s political firmament shifted. The new landscape is not, at least at first glance, promising.

Thirty years on from that first democratic election in 1994, the extent to which we have descended into disenchantment and disillusion is reflected in the poorest electoral turnout yet. Only 59% of registered voters cast ballots.

The ANC has crumbled, delivering – with two-thirds of the voting districts counted – as poor a performance as the worst of the pre-election surveys predicted.

With its loss of control of KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, it