NEVER since the end of apartheid in 1994 has an election in South Africa been fought along such unashamedly rac ist lines. As elsewhere in the world, local government elections usually produce a yawn. But in the run-up to the municipal polls on May 18th, leaders of the ruling Af rican National Congress (anc), including President Jacob Zuma, played the race card remorselessly, in a bid to block the slow but steady rise of the Democratic Alliance (da), led by a white woman, Helen Zille. As an investigative journalist on the lib eral Rand Daily Mail in the 1970s, it was Ms Zille who first exposed the apartheid gov ernment for lying about the murder in pri son of Steve Biko, a Black Consciousness leader. Rewarded with death threats and obliged to resign her job, she became a leading light in the Black Sash, a white women's human-rights group. Given a suspended prison sentence for being in a black "group area" without a permit, she let her home be used as a safe house for anti-apartheid campaigners and in the tur bulent 1980s was forced into hiding with her two-year-old son.
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