South Africans still loyal to ANC 10 years later

Thursday, April 15, 2004

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- An elderly woman wrapped in the colors of the governing African National Congress spoke for millions who lined up Wednesday to vote in South Africa's third all-race national election. "The ANC held our hand and brought us through hell," said Noluthando Nokwando, a 66-year-old woman from the squalid Cape Town township of Khayelitsha. "We can give them a chance -- and our respect -- for another five years." Despite lingering poverty, high unemployment and an AIDS crisis, a debt of gratitude to the party that toppled apartheid a decade ago still holds sway in South Africa. The ANC has improved living conditions and the economy, but above all, it has presided over a peaceful transition to majority rule that many once thought impossible.

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