Scanning the international press, it turns out that the best story about South Africa’s local government elections (LGE) is that there is almost no story. The basic facts of the LGE outcome have generally been covered by the international media in a perfunctory and somewhat flat way.

It has been reported, entirely correctly, that “the party of Mandela has suffered a devastating setback” (The Wall Street Journal), that “South Africa’s ANC faces ‘worst nightmare’ as vote share tumbles” (Reuters), and that “ANC face own midterm reckoning” (The Washington Post).

Most reports note the country is in an era of coalition government, and several point out that this will be a period of “intense political horse-trading” (the Financial Times) and “squabbles over whether [the ANC and Democratic Alliance] rule major cities together” (The Economist). But what is notable is that none of them have suggested there is likely to be an intensification of civil unrest, let alone a sharpening of racial conflict.

In fact, no one is predicting gloom and doom. This is so unusual against South Africa’s long history of low expectations that we need to mark it. We need to note how unexpected the sheer everyday normality of this moment is.

There was always a great fear that when the African National Congress (ANC) went it would go kicking and screaming, amid widespread violence and a breakdown of civil order. “Political parties don’t give up power easily in Africa”, some have said. Neighbouring Zimbabwe’s fraught relationship with democracy is often referenced.

In 1999, The Wall Street Journal carried an article suggesting that South Africa was doomed to “violent revolution” as the anger of the dispossessed poor would drive them over the barriers erected by the country’s diminishing middle-class and smash the country. The point is that one of world’s foremost publications found it credible to carry the doom narrative about South Africa.

But in these local government elections, the party that has dominated South African politics for three decades has limply conceded the moment. The Financial Times referred to "the incredible shrinking ANC”. The paper could equally have noted how quietly it has faced the loss of municipal offices all over the country.

President Cyril Ramaphosa has effectively said South African voters did the right thing, judging the ANC in government by its inability to facilitate employment and opportunity or deliver basic municipal services like water, electricity, refuse collection, and safe streets. “In pursuit of this, they have made their political choices,” he said.

ANC Secretary-General Fikile Mbalula made a similar point: “We have to recognise that many South Africans who once placed their confidence in the ANC have chosen to support other parties … we will not question their judgement or explain away their decisions.”

The local elections were generally conducted both efficiently and peacefully. When the Electoral Commission of South Africa declared on Sunday evening that the process had been “free and fair”, no voice dissented. Markets made South African credit several points cheaper and the JSE closed 2.5% higher for the week on Friday.

South Africa has a long tradition of doomsaying. The 1994 political settlement is often described as having averted what was widely expected to be a racial conflagration. Long before that moment, Arthur Keppel-Jones had suggested in his dystopian novel When Smuts Goes, published in 1947, the year before the National Party was elected, that the country was on a path to a dark and violent future. In the novel, racial conflict and chaos intensify until majority rule is brought about through international intervention.

Journalist Lester Venter borrowed from Keppel-Jones for the title of his 1997 analysis When Mandela Goes. It too provides a gloomy long-term view of the country’s prospects with its future bedevilled by deepening racial and class divisions. Venter did not suggest catastrophic outcomes, but a deepening of risk.

South African reality has defied the doomsayers. This is not for a moment to suggest that the country’s rates of murder and violent crime are not concerns. But the country has never stepped over the brink and immersed itself in general violence on the scale suggested by the more negative observers. The ANC’s widespread losses were the most recent moment when such a step might have been expected by pessimistic observers. Instead, the country didn’t even approach such a brink, if, indeed, such a thing exists.