DIEPSLOOT, South Africa — On Wednesday, voters began lining up shortly after midnight in this sprawling settlement north of Johannesburg. By 4:30 a.m., there were lines a thousand people long at some polling stations.
Thomas Baloyi, 49, arrived at 5:45 a.m. and only cast his ballot five hours later. He said he voted for the African National Congress, the party that led the liberation from apartheid and has governed the country during the 15 years it has been a democracy.
“I am an A.N.C. man until the day I die,” said Mr. Baloyi, an unemployed laborer. “I don’t care who the candidate is, as long as he is A.N.C.”
Disappointment runs deep among South Africans. In one recent poll, fewer than half of them thought they were better off now than they were under apartheid, according to the research group Afrobarometer . Yet if the polls are correct, the A.N.C. is about to win the nation’s fourth democratic election in yet another landslide, and its leader, the self-educated populist Jacob Zuma, will become president.
The question is whether the party can equal the 70 percent share it tallied in 2004 or will get something closer to the 63 percent it won under Nelson Mandela in 1994. Results will start trickling in late Wednesday and the bulk of the ballots will be counted on Thursday and Friday.
The A.N.C.’s seemingly certain victory underscores the way South Africa, after being unshackled from apartheid, has been a virtual one-party state, so much so that many here worry about the political future of the nation regarded as the democratic anchor of the continent.
In Diepsloot, however, democracy seemed to be on prideful display. Standing in the morning chill, voters could have been giving a lecture on citizenship in a civics class. One after another, they spoke about making a difference and having their voice heard.
“If you don’t vote, you can’t complain,” said Lubabalo Nobadula, a 20-year-old student casting a ballot for the first time. “I voted A.N.C. because I owe the party. They liberated the country and I am repaying the debt.”
The nation’s democracy is young enough that many voters spoke of casting their ballot as a way of honoring those who sacrificed in the struggle for freedom.
“I always vote A.N.C. because of Nelson Mandela and all he did for the struggle,” said Mary Jane Tyutula, an unemployed 28-year-old. “I won’t let him down.”
Some 23 million South Africans are registered to vote, and by early Wednesday the turnout seemed to be huge. Brigalia Bam, the chairwoman of the nation’s Independent Election Commission, said there had been only a few reported irregularities in the voting. In fact, she said in most areas there was “a carnival mood.”
The thousands waiting in line in Diepsloot were orderly, most spending their hours standing in single file. At one polling station, the line stretched 200 yards down one street, past Minguni’s Butchery, Mido’s Take Away, and the Gang Star Hair Salon and Shoe Repair, and then turned the corner at Dr. Dungu’s, the traditional herbalist healer, and then turned back again past the decrepit houses on Parks Mankahlana Street.
Poverty is the common thread through Diepsloot. About 150,000 people are crowded into a new community that has grown up in the far northern reaches of the Johannesburg suburbs. Some residents are fortunate enough to have government-provided houses.
Others live in rented shacks behind those houses, paying extra to their landlords for electricity and water. Still more people live in impromptu hovels commonly called mkhukhus, a Zulu word — without any electricity, water or sanitation.
Last year, there were deathly riots here, as South Africans took out their grievances about their destitution and joblessness against immigrants. But though people also complain about corrupt local officials, they rarely aim their anger at the A.N.C.
“It has only been 15 years, and South Africa is so big you can’t fix everything in that short a time,” said Johannes Seete, 55, an unemployed driver who lives in a shed made of wood and corrugated metal.
South Africa has a population of 48.7 million, and the poor rightfully credit the A.N.C. with giving them a lift. In 1996, two years after the end of apartheid, only 2.5 million people received government grants. That number is now 13.4 million, with most of the money provided for children.
Under A.N.C. leadership, about 2.7 million subsidized houses have been built, the government says. Most of the country now has access to potable water, and three-quarters of all households have electricity and access to sanitation.
But people now judge the government against a scale of rising expectations. “I registered to get a house back in 1997 and I am still waiting, staying in a shack behind somebody else’s house,” complained Themba Frank Maseko, who lives in a community called Olievenhoutbosch.
South Africa has the continent’s largest economy, and until the recession it enjoyed 10 consecutive years of growth. It is no longer rare to see a black person driving a Mercedes or buying expensive clothes in a boutique.
But wealth favors the few, and in South Africa the chasm of inequality is among the worst in the world. On average, whites still earn nearly 10 times as much as blacks. The official unemployment rate is 21.9 percent, and it nearly doubles when the definition of joblessness includes frustrated workers who have given up on finding work.
Under apartheid, the school system was deliberately set up to provide nonwhites with inferior instruction, but many experts contend that the schools have worsened rather than improved. The A.N.C. government was slow in providing antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients, allowing 365,000 South Africans to die prematurely, according to a Harvard University study.
People are hardly blind to their government’s failures. Only 38 percent of South Africans think their country is heading in the right direction, down from 73 percent in 2004, according to the polling firm Ipsos Markinor.
The A.N.C., then, may seem vulnerable to a credible rival. Late last year it appeared the party might find itself in its first real battle to maintain dominance. Infighting had caused a splinter group to start its own party, the Congress of the People, or COPE. These dissidents had solid liberation-struggle bona fides, and analysts predicted they could alchemize discontent into upward of 30 percent of the vote.
But COPE suffered infighting of its own, and without the hefty bankroll of the A.N.C., the new party is now expected to get 8 to 16 percent of the vote, merely making it one of the more successful of two dozen also-rans.
COPE’s presidential candidate is a relatively unknown Methodist bishop, Mvume Dandala. He has used the metaphor of an abused wife in describing his frustration in trying to pry voters from the A.N.C. That wife may complain about beatings from her husband, he said, “but in the end she concludes that without this man she might never have been married.”
The Western Cape, one of the nation’s nine provinces, is the stronghold of the Democratic Alliance, the party that came in second in the 2004 election, with 12 percent of the vote. Polls indicate that the party may win a plurality in the province, allowing it to form a coalition government with its leader, Cape Town’s mayor, Helen Zille, at the top. But the racial mix of the Western Cape is markedly different from the rest of the country’s, with more than 70 percent either white or of mixed race.
Lucia Mavhungu, an unemployed 22-year-old woman who lives in Alexandra township, said she was alone among her friends in supporting the Democratic Alliance.
“Most blacks think it’s the white party, and they’re afraid it’ll take us back to apartheid,” she said. “If people have a grievance against the A.N.C., they’re more likely not to vote than go for anyone else.”
The main inheritor of this loyalty to the A.N.C. is Mr. Zuma, 67, a political survivor known for his bare-knuckle fight with Mr. Mbeki to lead the A.N.C. and for his own brushes with the law. He was acquitted in a 2006 rape trial. And two weeks ago, prosecutors, citing procedural reasons, dropped a corruption case that had dogged him for eight years.
Most people in the poorer communities around Johannesburg say they are comfortable with Mr. Zuma, whose humble past closely matches their own. They certainly trust his party, and he promises there will be no major shake-up in the nation’s policies.
Nelson Mandela has endorsed him. Last Sunday, the frail 90-year-old A.N.C. elder appeared at a party rally and sat beside Mr. Zuma. Late Wednesday morning, Mr. Mandela voted at a country club in the Johannesburg suburb of Killarney. A long black overcoat protected him against the cold. He needed assistance in walking, but for South Africans, his iconic presence seemed to lend dignity to their election day holiday.
Another struggle icon, the retired Archbishop Desmond Tutu, voted in Cape Town. His participation was something of a surprise. He made headlines last year when he said he would not vote unless the A.N.C. healed its internal rifts, and just a few weeks ago lamented the prospect of Mr. Zuma being president, saying he was unfit to govern.
On Wednesday, he would not reveal who he voted for but he told reporters that his decision came after much soul-searching. “For many it is no longer a sort of foregone thing,” he said, according South African news reports. “In the first years of our freedom most people tended to vote A.N.C.,” adding that the choice was no longer straightforward.
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