that map seems to imply Al Jama-ah won somewhere, but I do not see where it's at. I assume it's in one of the urban areas, is there a zoom in on those?
I assume Tim is correct in Orania being the FF+ area in Northern Cape, that sounds like the type of place to vote like 80% FF+. What is the rural EFF area? Mining settlements with a strong union, maybe?
Al Jama-ah won a ward and some VDs in
Lenasia, former Indian township in the South of Johannesburg with a big Muslim population.
The places giving huge numbers to FF+ are basically all farms, with a handful of votes cast, so they barely make an impact even at the level of their own wards.
What's the pattern of MK vs. IFP areas?
The simple answer is the former KwaZulu homeland. In KwaZulu traditional structures are much stronger, as in the influence of traditional chiefs but also family structures, social links that are stronger that all lead to a slightly different voting tradition (as well as the legacy of IFP nationalist propaganda up until the end of Apartheid). Imagine the different types of right wing votes you get in the Vendée in France compared to the Pas-de-Calais if that makes sense.
Are the municipalities actually somewhat gerrymandered? Or is the difference from maps of voting districts more down to the geographical divide between white farms and urbanised ex-homelands.
The difference in the size of the Voting Districts is purely population density. Densley populated former towships of the one had but also the Northern Cape as well as much of the Free State and North West privinces are extremely sparsely populated. Cf those FF+ voting farms that could have twenty votes cast, but cover hundreds of square kilometres.
That said, the municipalities were very conciously designed to be huge. the metro municipalities are usually contiguous with more than their entire urban areas (the Joburg/Ekurhuleni split being the exception), while rural ones can cover dozens of different towns and stretch for thousands of sqaure kilomtres.
The reason for this is simple: apartheid spatial planning. Because the different population groups were stuck in different areas, huge municipalities had to be created in order to ensure that they were racially mixed, and more importantly, that resources would be shared between rich (white) and poor (not white) ones. Not that there hasn't been some ring fencing in practice of course, via the useschool fees and the like. In particular, this was to counter the apartheid days where municipaliy boundaries were drawn tightly to ensure that were racially homogenous and that resources would be concentrated in white areas.
