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South Africa’s young radicals are turning on Mandela

They view the ANC as an elite project

In 2021, at the age of 24, Chad Louw became South Africa’s youngest ever mayor. Then a member of the governing African National Congress party (ANC), Louw was elected in Oudtshoorn, a town in the Klein Karoo region of the Western Cape. This is a sparse, dusty world of open expanses, straight highways and dramatic mountain ranges. In the early 20th century, it supplied a global fashion for ostrich feathers, a boom period that endowed Oudtshoorn with a crop of stately colonial mansions known locally as ostrich palaces. Today, these buildings give the town a quaint character that sits uneasily amid the signs of poverty and unemployment.

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