South Africa’s ruling African National Congress suffered what analysts are calling “disaster” at local elections on August 3.

The ANC still won a slight majority of the vote, but was defeated in the capital Pretoria and Nelson Mandela Bay on the east coast, and also lost its edge in the economic hub of Johannesburg.

The big winner was the opposite Democratic Alliance.

The ANC, on the ground, can rightly point to significant improvements it has made in Africa’s most advanced economy, including more housing and increased basic sanitation countrywide. But that wasn’t enough.

Its reputation has been battered by the corruption scandals engulfing President Jacob Zuma, high unemployment, and the government’s incompetence, making for disenchanted voters. Some party elders are now saying it is time to feed Zuma to the sharks.

The losses in the big urban areas matter, because these areas were the battlegrounds of the anti-apartheid struggle, and analysts say the ANC can’t afford to be seen as a “village party” that prevails only in the rural areas, but is weak in the urban areas where the future will be shaped. It would be cast as a “party of the past.”

However, the reversals for Nelson Mandela’s party could have far-reaching and potentially positive impacts beyond its borders.

It was the first time a liberation party in Africa has suffered such misfortune, and not tried to overturn it. In 2008, Zimbabwe’s 92-year-old strongman Robert Mugabe lost in the first round of presidential elections to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change’s Morgan Tsvangirai.

“Uncle Bob” then unleashed ferocious terror on Tsvangirai and his supporters as the second round vote approached, forcing the MDC leader to throw in the towel, thus allowing Mugabe to coast home unchallenged.

The outcome in South Africa could signal that the long-running dominance of liberation parties – in countries like Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Namibia – can be overcome by democratic politics, not violence, as is happening in Burundi and Mozambique.

Secondly, that it is possible to shed blood in a liberation struggle, and not consider it to be a right conferred by history to keep rigging elections to maintain the party in power at whatever cost, as was witnessed in Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Angola, to name a few.

The humiliation of the ANC at the polls is thus also actually a moment of pride. It shows that, in some respects, South Africa is actually ahead of its peers on the continent.

It may just be what the doctor ordered for the next advance in African pluralistic democracy. The ANC has provided political and moral leadership by accident, and today it is possible to begin imaging a world where African liberators are not infallible overlords.

The Democratic Alliance is portrayed by critics as the party of “white privilege.” And as opposed to the radical Economic Freedom Fighters party of former ANC youth leader Julius Nyerere, it is for “capitalism.”

The EFF wants to nationalise everything, and basically take all the wealth around and give it to the masses. It placed a distant third. The performance of the DA could speak to a rising pragmatism in South Africa, and the modest harvest of EFF to a rejection of reckless populism. In all, they gave off a good modern African smell.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is publisher of data visualiser Africapaedia and Rogue Chiefs. Twitter@cobbo3