As the year draws to an end South Africans are aware that the curtain is closing on an era in which Nelson Mandela was the dominant figure, first as the prisoner who won international acclaim for his steadfast resistance to apartheid and then as the triumphant politician who won praise for his sagacity as the prophet of reconciliation after decades of racial conflict.
The epoch will finally come to an end after next year's election - due to be held between May 1st and June 30th - when Mandela relinquishes the presidential office which he has occupied since May 1994.
Deputy President Thabo Mbeki, who succeeded Mandela as national leader of the ruling African National Congress in December last year, is already functioning as South Africa's de facto president in many ways. Only unexpected death or a serious lapse of moral judgment can prevent him from taking over formally from the patriarchal Mandela.
Mbeki, aged 57, is an intellectually nimble and tough politician whose status as Mandela's chosen successor has never been in doubt since he got the nod ahead of former ANC secretary-general Cyril Ramaphosa, the only ANC notable who had the potential to defeat him.
But for the present Mbeki lacks Mandela's charisma. Worse still there are suspicions that he is driven by an incipient megalomania, as evidenced by an ANC decision, taken since he took over its leadership from Mandela, to deprive provincial branches of the movement of the power to elect provincial premiers and to vest it instead in the national leadership.
Another sign of concern about Mbeki's penchant for centralising decision-making in his hands and those of his entourage is a letter to an aid agency from the executive director of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. In it Wilmot James, warns of of a possible shift towards authoritarianism under Mbeki and the consequent need to monitor respect for human rights under his presidency.
The letter, emphatically rejected by the ANC, is interpreted by ANC loyalists as a bid by Wilmot to justify his appeal for greater donor funds. But, while he may have overstated the case, James is not alone in expressing concern about Mbeki.
Mbeki's leadership of the ANC has coincided with a fall in its support. Opinion '99, a major investigation into the attitudes and allegiances of South Africa's estimated electorate of 25 million, shows that ANC support is at its lowest level since it came to power in 1994. It now stands at 51 per cent compared with the nearly 63 per cent who supported it in 1994.
But the ANC is not in danger of defeat at the polls. Its disaffected supporters have not joined opposition parties but, rather, swelled the number of undecided voters. These uncommitted voters now account for a fifth of the electorate.
With one exception - the Democratic Party - opposition parties have shed support in parallel with the ANC. The former ruling National Party has lost about half of the just over 20 per cent it garnered in the watershed 1994 election. The DP's sevenfold increase is from a tiny base of one percent in 1994 and that has been mainly at the expense of the NP.
The gap between the ANC and its nearest rivals, the NP and Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party, is as wide as it was in 1994.
Thus, despite its loss of support, the ANC may still obtain a two-thirds majority in the pending election, particularly if it wins a lion's share of the undecided voters. There are indications that the ANC will deploy patriarchal Mandela in the forth coming election campaign to achieve that objective.
In the meantime Mbeki remains an enigma to many South Africans, his increased media exposure, especially on television, notwithstanding.
He talks passionately of an African renaissance and uses the term African in an exclusive sense to denote indigenous blacks, thereby implying, though he denies it, that there are no white or brown Africans, that the descendants of European or Asian immigrants are still interlopers.
Yet he spends a great deal of time in Europe, America and Asia and seldom, if ever, delivers a major speech in an African language. Seasoned journalists are stumped when asked whether they can recall Mbeki addressing a rally or meeting in Xhosa or Zulu or Sotho.
If there is a significant difference in approach between Mbeki and Mandela, it lies in emphasis. Both agree that the reconciliation and redress through affirmative action are two important pillars in ANC policy. But, where Mandela tends to place greater stress on reconciliation, Mbeki attaches greater weight to compensating blacks for the subordination and suffering inflicted on them during the long, dark night of apartheid.
Thus whites who feel aggrieved or threatened by the preferential treatment given to victims of South Africa's past, and their descendants, are likely to feel even more insecure under an Mbeki presidency. So, too, for that matter, will Indians and coloureds (mixed race): a new tendency in ANC policy is to give priority to the claims of indigenous blacks over those of coloureds and Indians, who, though they suffered under apartheid, occupied higher rungs in the racial hierarchy constructed by apartheid apparatchiks.
As Mandela, who had his 80th birthday in July, increasingly assumes the role of elder statesman, South Africans of all hues respect his contribution to racial reconciliation. An abiding memory for many whites is the cry of "Nelson! Nelson!" which rang across the rugby stadium when South Africa played Australia in the first match of the 1995 World Cup: they were chanting his name as a mantra for victory.
Yet - and in post-apartheid South Africa there are almost invariably qualifying Yets and Buts - South Africa still remains a deeply divided racial society. Opinion '99 shows that only too clearly.
Thus the ANC remains pre-eminently the party of the black majority. It continues to draw the vast bulk of its committed supporters from the black community, with relatively little backing from the non-black communities. Conversely, the predominant support for the main parliamentary opposition parties, the NP and the DP, emanates from the minority white, coloured and Indian communities.
The present racially aligned nature of party political allegiances means that full reconciliation is still a long way off, even if Mandela himself is popular in all communities. It has another important consequence: it makes the ANC invulnerable to defeat.
Hence some political observers contend that South Africa's elections are racial polls, in which the outcome is known before the first vote is cast.