The late-twentieth century's most obvious historical anomaly, the ‘legalized’ form of racial oppression that was apartheid, remained for many decades an on-going challenge to both activists and analysts engaged in the project of realizing social justice – knowing all the while that this deeply inequitable system should change, could change, would change, but not knowing when it would change, or how, or by whose efforts. Nonetheless, by the end of the new millennium's first decade, we had in fact witnessed South Africa's negotiated realization of a new colour-blind democratic constitution as well as several elections on this new roughly open and non-racial basis: that of 1994 bringing Nelson Mandela andhis African National Congress (ANC) to office; that of 1999 reaffirming, with the election of Thabo Mbeki as Mandela's successor as President, both the democratic content of the transition and the ANC's overwhelming legitimacy as governing party; that of 2004 reconfirming the ANC in state power (notwithstanding Mbeki andhis team's dramatically flawed leadership); that of 2009 which, in the wake of Mbeki's dismissal from office, did reaffirm in power the ANC, now under President Jacob Zuma's leadership – albeit without much sense that the latter's newly-restructured ruling coalition would transform the deeply inequitable and dependent country now under his sway. The national election sometime in 2014 has seemed likely merely further to cement Zuma's dominance, although even that can no longer merely be assumed.