JOHANNESBURG — When 360,000 gold and  coal miners walked off the job in  South Africa in 1987, protesting the poor pay and grim working conditions of apartheid-era mines, a charismatic young man named Cyril Ramaphosa, the firebrand leader of the National Union of Mineworkers, led the charge.

But as the  police opened fire on workers engaged in a wildcat strike at a platinum mine two weeks ago, killing 34 people, Mr. Ramaphosa, now a multimillionaire business tycoon and senior leader of the governing  African National Congress , found himself in a very different position: on the board of the company the workers were striking against, the London-based Lonmin.

Mr. Ramaphosa’s journey from hunted labor activist to industry titan and perennial presidential contender is an emblem of South Africa’s spectacular transition from brutally enforced white minority rule to a multiracial democracy where, in theory at least, anyone with talent has a chance to succeed.

But the low pay and tin-walled hovels of the miners who went on strike at Lonmin’s mine — conditions in many ways reminiscent of the ones faced by the miners Mr. Ramaphosa led — starkly demonstrate the failure of the A.N.C. to deliver its own slogan: “A better life for all.”

Now, as the shock of the killings reverberates through the nation, the party that liberated South Africa is facing perhaps its gravest challenge since it took power in the country’s first multiracial elections in 1994: seething rage from the poor in one of the world’s most unequal societies and a sense that the A.N.C. has created a wealthy black elite, including men like Mr. Ramaphosa, without changing the lives of ordinary people.

“South Africa is a social, political and economic disaster waiting to happen,” said Aubrey Matshiqi, a political analyst. “The anger is there. All you need is a spark, and then you will have social and political and economic veld fires burning out of control.”

These days it can seem that South Africa has been turned upside down. Relying on apartheid-era legal tactics, prosecutors have said  they are charging 270 miners arrested after the melee, not the police officers who fired the bullets, with the murder of their colleagues.

It is not the first time an arm of government has been accused of adopting strategies from the apartheid era. Efforts by the government of President  Jacob Zuma to criminalize publication of a broad range of information, to limit the independence of the judiciary and to give  greater powers to unelected tribal monarchs have bled away support from the A.N.C.

While the end of apartheid transformed South Africa’s political and institutional landscape, placing blacks at the helm, it left the economic hierarchy largely untouched. A favored few black businessmen, many of them with deep ties to the A.N.C., have become wealthy. But for a vast majority of blacks, inequality has deepened.

The failure to transform the economy is one the A.N.C. freely admits. At a party conference in June, Mr. Zuma urged more radical steps, but such calls may have come too late, as younger, more aggressive leaders whip up the anger of the poor and unemployed.

Days before Mr. Zuma went to speak to miners in the town of Marikana, where the strike occurred, the populist youth leader Julius Malema, who was expelled from the A.N.C. amid a fierce battle with Mr. Zuma, stood up to address them. Mr. Malema has advocated nationalizing mines and seizing white-owned land, positions the A.N.C. is unlikely to adopt.

“President Zuma has presided over the massacre of our people,” he told the miners, drawing loud cheers.

As Mr. Zuma stood last week before a crowd of angry workers near the spot where 34 of their colleagues had been killed, an attendant holding an umbrella to shield him from the sun, his Everyman roots seemed to fail him, and he struggled to find the words to stem the tide of their rage.

The image of corporate stooge that Mr. Zuma’s opponents paint would seem an ill fit. He rose to power on a populist surge of anger against his predecessor, the tweedy, cerebral Thabo Mbeki, whose embrace of laissez-faire economic policy angered many on the left. A grade-school dropout turned freedom fighter, Mr. Zuma could not be a starker contrast to Mr. Mbeki, a University of Sussex graduate with a fondness for quoting Yeats.

But now Mr. Zuma may find himself in Mr. Mbeki’s shoes, battling to remain head of the party at a vote in December, and to serve a second term as president. The Marikana killings have fed a groundswell against him, currently gathering force around his vice president, Kgalema Motlanthe, who is widely reported to be considering a move against Mr. Zuma much like the one that removed Mr. Mbeki.

Whoever becomes South Africa’s next president will face the deepening sense of betrayal that after 18 years, little progress has been made to tackle joblessness, inequality and poverty.

“It might make many of us quiver with fear, but here is the cold, hard truth: they will opt out of the current social, economic and political arrangements and they will choose anarchy,”  wrote Justice Malala , a political analyst, in The Times, a South African newspaper.

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Rodger Bosch/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Friday, miners paid their respects to Mpuzeni Ngxande, one of the 34 people killed on Aug. 16 during the strikers’ protest.  More Photos »

Miners have been fleeing the National Union of Mineworkers, which has acquired a reputation, fairly or not, for coziness with big business. Its new leader recently received a 40 percent raise, according to The Mail and Guardian, a newspaper in Johannesburg, to more than $12,500 a month.