On 29 May this year, South Africans will go to the polls to vote in their seventh democratic general election. Thirty years ago, the country’s first free and fair election saw the formal end of apartheid when, as Cato Pedder writes, “all night, all that day, all the next day, 19.5 million people, 85% of the electorate, queue[d] peacefully outside polling stations across the country … And each of them, as they receive[d] their ballot paper … [felt] this ritual [was] somehow holy.” With Nelson Mandela as the president of the new South Africa, the country was full of hope,...