Telegraph|It may be the Rainbow Nation, but the political history of South Africa has long been writ in black and white.

Quarter of a century after the end of apartheid, however, there is a twist in the script. 

On Wednesday, when South Africa votes in a general election, some of the country’s whites will mark their ballots for the African National Congress for the first time. In contrast, a growing number of blacks are set to turn their backs on the party that liberated them from decades of white rule.

One man is responsible for this apparent contravention of the unstated rules of South African politics: Cyril Ramaphosa, the would-be reformer who became the country’s fourth black president in February last year.

For a cautious moderate, Mr Ramaphosa elicits strong passions. To those impatient for a more equitable distribution of South Africa’s wealth, he is sometimes seen as a mealy-mouthed cipher for white business who long ago betrayed the ideals of the black liberation struggle.

For others, he is the one man who could stop the rot in Africa’s most famous party and rescue the country from perdition after years of crippling looting under his predecessor Jacob Zuma.

Among the latter are a surprising number of whites, most of whom usually vote for South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA). Peter Bruce, the former editor of Business Day, the country’s foremost financial newspaper, is one of the most prominent of such voices.

Although describing himself as “very much not” a typical ANC voter and admitting he will be “holding his nose” when he casts his ballot for the party, the choice for him is simple.

“We are in the fortunate position of having somebody quite sensible, a very centred, sane and rational person, as president of the ANC at the moment,” he said. “I think it would be a ridiculous thing to turn down the opportunity to try to strengthen his hand.”

There is little doubt that the ANC, as it has in all five previous elections since the dawn of majority rule, will form the next government. 

Yet Mr Ramaphosa is vulnerable. Should the ANC’s share of the vote slip substantially below the 62 percent it won in 2014, a powerful alliance of Zuma loyalists and far-left populists within the party could attempt to overthrow him.

The president represents much that they detest, from his investment-friendly instincts to his determination to clean up the rot that took hold of South Africa’s institutions in the Zuma years.

It is precisely that prospect, though, that endears him to many in South Africa’s white-dominated business world.

“Some wealthy whites I know are voting for Ramaphosa,” says Peter Leon, a former DA provincial leader and partner at the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills. “They think he is the Gorbachev of the ANC, that he will lead the country out of the wilderness.”

That sentiment is shared, to a degree, even among some white farmers. Causing widespread alarm, Mr Ramaphosa gave his backing last year to an ANC proposal to allow the seizure of white-owned farms without compensation.

In the verdant pasturelands of the Natal midlands, white farmers are nervous that such a move could turn into a Zimbabwe-style land grab.

But even here some, like Grant Warren, who owns a dairy farm making artisanal cheese in the rolling hills of the Karkloof outside the town of Howick, are contemplating voting for the ANC for the first time.

They hope that Mr Ramaphosa can rein in his party’s populist instincts and ensure that land reform is carried out in a measured manner — although many wonder if he is really strong enough to do so.

“I trust him and I would like to vote for him, but I haven’t decided yet,” Mr Warren said as he walked through a field of Red Holsteins.

“When you see the scoundrels on the ANC’s list of candidates you have to wonder if he will be taken out by his own people.”

Finding an equitable solution that still manages to protect property rights in South Africa is one of many challenges Mr Ramaphosa will face in his first full term.

The heady optimism that culminated in Nelson Mandela becoming president 25 years ago on Friday has largely evaporated amid growing anger that South Africa remains one of the world’s most unequal states.

At a convention centre in Nasrec, a Johannesburg suburb close to the township of Soweto, a group of black South Africans tours the ANC pavilion in the building where Mr Ramaphosa was voted in as the party’s leader by the narrowest of margins in December, 2017.

The stirring slogans of the ANC’s Freedom Charter, adopted in 1955, are displayed on exhibition boards: “The people shall share in the country’s wealth,” one declares, “The land shall be shared among those who work on it,” another, “There shall be work and security,” a third.

Stan Masevhe and his friends are unimpressed. All these years later, South Africa’s wealth and land are still disproportionately in the hands of whites. Most blacks still live in squalor. Unemployment stands at 27 percent.

“They have failed to deliver on so many of these promises,” says Mr Masevhe, a government health worker. “Where I live in Limpopo we are still fetching water from the river.”

For the first time, he will not be voting for the ANC, opting instead for the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), a radical party whose leader Julius Malema calls Mr Mandela a “sell-out”, advocates the seizure of all white farms and proposes the redistribution of wealth through blanket nationalisation.

“Malema is a fresh man with fresh ideas,” Mr Masevhe says. “We need an equal share of the land. The EFF says it will take the land without compensation. That is the way forward.”

Yet, until Mr Zuma became president in 2009, South Africa was taking steps to becoming a fairer society. Black membership of the middle class grew to 50 percent, while 90 percent of households were connected to the grid, giving many black South Africans electricity for the first time.

The progress came to a stuttering halt in the Zuma years. Commissions of enquiry are beginning to reveal the startling amount that was plundered, perhaps in excess of £21 billion. 

Economic growth came to a standstill as state-owned enterprises were raided. Eskom, the state electricity monopoly, saw its debt rise tenfold. As a result power cuts have been a near daily event in much of the country, at least until the election campaign began.

Far more farmland could have ended up in the hands of blacks, too — but a lack of access to credit and a failure to offer training to blacks meant that 90 percent of black-owned farms failed and now lie abandoned.

Mr Ramaphosa is trying to repair a rotten legacy, and has begun appointing reputable professionals to senior positions.

But the holdovers from the Zuma era still hold great sway in the ANC, controlling some of its top posts. Many are itching to replace Mr Ramaphosa with one of their own, a chance that could come if the party fares poorly on Wednesday.

Should they succeed, commentators say, the party is likely to embrace at least some of the more radical policies of the EFF — currently the only party projected to increase its share of the vote — if only to distract attention from the resumption of looting.

Given the risk, not all white farmers around Howick are embracing “Ramaphoria”. Should the pro-market DA lose seats there will be even less chance of preventing land seizures, says Robin Barnsley, who owns a large commercial chicken farm with his brother Kevin.

“We’ve been told that Ramaphosa is our only hope but I wouldn’t change the way I vote,” he said. “He will never succeed as long as the upper echelons of the ANC are dominated by the Zuma camp.

“He will go ahead with expropriation. He has to listen to his lieutenants.”