South Africans went to the polls yesterday, voting in a steady, disciplined and even stoical fashion rather than with the palpable enthusiasm which marked the first all-race election in 1994.
The election, the first since the African National Congress came to power in 1994, marked the end of an era in which the outgoing president, Mr Nelson Mandela, cast a long shadow over the country, first as a prisoner of conscience and then as a white-haired sage who preached a message of reconciliation.
Mr Mandela discarded his party political identity as an ANC patriarch in his final message to voters, urging them to vote to entrench South Africa's fledgling democracy rather than exhorting them to vote for the ANC.
"I wish everyone who has registered to vote, no matter what party they belong to," he said.
But if the imminent withdrawal of Mr Mandela (80) from the political arena - he plans to retire to his birthplace at Qunu in the Transkei - signalled the end of an epoch, there was a same time a strong element of continuity in the situation. Every opinion poll conducted over the past six months has pointed to a massive victory for his beloved ANC.
The only question that remained as the voters queued outside polling booths on a cold but clear winter's day was whether the ANC would win a two-thirds majority and thus be in a position to change nearly every important clause in the constitution.
With the leadership of the ANC in the hands of Mr Thabo Mbeki (56), who served a long apprenticeship under first Mr Oliver Tambo, who led the ANC while most of its leaders were in exile or prison, and then Mr Mandela, the retiring octogenarian could rest assured. His quest to transform South Africa into a "non-racial democracy", and to help the historically disadvantaged black community, would not be abandoned.
The voters queuing outside the nearly 15,000 polling booths throughout South Africa could choose between 16 parties, ranging from the Afrikaner-dominated Freedom Front to the exclusively black Azanian People's Organisation.
But with at least 60 per cent of the votes cast by the more than 18 million registered voters likely to go the ANC, very little was left for the remaining 15 parties. Of the opposition parties, two had been identified by opinion polls as the main contenders for the anti-ANC vote.
They were the New National Party (NNP), as the National Party which ruled South Africa for 46 years while the franchise was denied to the indigenous black majority has renamed itself, and the Democratic Party (DP), heir to the liberal tradition and led by the combative Mr Tony Leon.
That left only a small proportion of the votes for the remaining 13 parties, some of which may not even gain the roughly 40,000 votes required to win one seat under South Africa's system of proportional representation.
As the poll proceeded yesterday one conclusion became obvious. Tens of thousands of young black people, who either could not or did not register as voters, did not storm polling booths demanding to vote, as feared by no less a person than Mr Johann Kriegler, who resigned as chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) after accusing the ANC-led government of undermining the independence of the commission.
There were obviously glitches, including the late opening of some polling booths, bomb scares or the delivery of too few ballot papers. But the spectre of large-scale disruptions did not materialise, perhaps in part because the government had taken the precaution of deploying 100,000 troops throughout the country to ensure a peaceful and orderly election day.
First results were expected at around midnight last night, though Mr Douglas Gibson, of the Democratic Party, was more than a little sceptical. He told The Irish Times that ballot papers were supposed to have been delivered in batches of 100 but many of the batches were either just under or just over that total. That might mean that electoral officials could face difficulties when they came to reconcile the number of ballot papers issued with the number of votes cast.
The most closely fought contests were likely to be in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, two provinces where the ANC failed to capture a majority of votes in 1994. In the Western Cape the NNP was the majority party. In KwaZulu-Natal the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) surfaced as the surprise winner of the contest for the majority of seats in the provincial legislature.
In the intervening years, however, the pendulum swung, with the ANC emerging as the major beneficiary. In the Western Cape a photo finish between the NNP and the ANC was predicted as voters went to the polls.
Neither was likely to gain an outright majority, and a hung provincial parliament was in the offing. That would mean the third-biggest party, identified as the DP by opinion polls, would hold the balance of power.
The question on the minds of most observers last night was whether the biggest party, whichever it was, would invite the DP to join it in a coalition government or whether the ANC and the NNP would join hands to exclude the DP.
While the NNP and the DP vied during the election over who was most steadfast in the opposition to the ANC, they spent much of their time sniping at each other. The NNP leader, Mr Martinus van Schalkwyk, hinted that he would like to be invited by the ANC to join a coalition at national government level. That meant, the DP believed, that Mr van Schalkwyk was likely to invite the ANC to form a coalition government with the NNP in the Western Cape if his party won the most votes there but not enough to form a government on its own.
The scenario unfolding in KwaZulu-Natal was as interesting. The poll predicted that the ANC would oust Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's IFP as the biggest party but without gaining an outright majority. But Mr Alexander Johnston, of the University of Natal, cautioned against writing the IFP off.
Its main support was concentrated in the rural hinterland of the provinces and its supporters were deeply suspicions of pollsters and unlikely to be frank with them, if they agreed to talk to them at all.
As the polls closed, Chief Buthelezi's hopes of being offered the position of deputy president as part of the deal leading to a pact between the ANC and the IFP depended very much on his party putting up a strong showing in the election.
He surprised observers in 1994, when the IFP won control of the province despite only entering the contest at the eleventh hour.
The question last night was whether he had another surprise in store for observers.