We have been in Cape Town for just over a week now, and it has been an eventful time to be in South Africa. Local elections were held across the country on Wednesday, May 18th, which some commentators described as the most important elections since 1994. Service delivery issues came to the forefront in the national debate dominated by the incumbent African National Congress (ANC) and the main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA). Cape Town is the only major city held by the DA, so we were in the middle of a hotly contested region. On Tuesday, during our lunch break in the middle of University of Cape Town's (UCT) campus, we saw Trevor Manuel campaigning for the ANC. He stopped to answer questions from UCT students. Manuel is the highly respected former Finance Minister and current cabinet minister, who is internationally credited for many of South Africa's strong economic policies. You can see we got a pretty good seat for his impromptu Q&A (photo thanks to Max Weihe). Wednesday was a national holiday for the elections. We were fortunate enough to get to visit a polling station and see the long ballots and longer lines. It was interesting to see the voting system and heartening to see the strong turn out. Some people we have talked with are fed up with all parties, but others saw this election as a chance to make a statement. The ANC predictably won the majority of the contests, but the DA cut into their share and held the Western Cape province. The issues we have seen come out in this election have tied in perfectly with issues learned in our lectures about South Africa's history, economy, race relations, human rights issues, and political environment.
I haven't even touched on our visits to townships, universities, vineyards, seal island, Table Mountain, etc. Needless to say, we've been busy, and taking a lot in.
