As a student in South Africa in the 1970s, I was gloomy about the country’s chances of becoming a democracy. It was not just that apartheid looked likely to last for ever. It was also that many of its opponents were set on replacing racial autocracy with the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marxism exerted a hold over a large swathe of apartheid’s foes, black and white. They gleefully greeted the rise to power of the Marxist Frelimo movement in Mozambique. At the largely white, left-leaning university I attended, many of my fellow students dismissed elections as a bourgeois sham, multiparty democracy as ”irrelevant”.