Mixed race vote key to Cape Town in S. Africa pollsPosted in Africa, Articles, New Media, Politics/Public Policy, South Africa on 2011-05-17 04:44Z by Steven |
Mixed race vote key to Cape Town in S. Africa polls
The Citizen
2011-05-16
Justine Gerardy
Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.
CAPE TOWN – Fruit seller Amien Cox will put his hopes on a white woman in South Africa’s local polls on Wednesday, 17 years after the fall of the racist apartheid regime that denied an all-race vote.
“No other option: DA,” said the mixed race supporter of the Democratic Alliance over the ruling African National Congress (ANC) that led South Africa into democracy.
“I’ll never vote any ANC, never. I’ll never vote for a black man, never,” said Cox, 72. “They don’t worry for us.”
Politicians have scrambled to woo mixed race voters, known locally as coloureds, who are the majority in Cape Town, South Africa’s only major city not in ruling party hands.
The battle is a two-party race between President Jacob Zuma’s ANC, which lost the city five years ago, and the DA led by Helen Zille, who is the first female leader of the party.
The coloured group is tipped to back the DA—years after many cast their first votes in 1994 for apartheid’s white minority nationalists that oppressed them but ranked them higher than blacks…
…Coloureds who have African, European, East Asian and South Indian roots had more privileges than the darker-skinned black majority in apartheid’s strict hierarchy designed to keep South Africa’s people apart and protect white power.
The divisions cut across separate housing, education and even language with Dutch settler-derived Afrikaans spoken instead of local African languages.
And while power has shifted, many still feel sidelined…
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