Cape Town?s respected mayor won the leadership of the white-dominated main opposition party Sunday, vowing to attract more black voters and break the divided African National Congress? (ANC) hold on power.

Helen Zille will have to work hard to dent the loyalty of South Africa?s black majority to the party that ended apartheid. Her Democratic Alliance generally wins less than 2 percent of the black vote, and South Africa has been without a strong opposition since white rule ended in 1994.

But Zille has already made inroads, wresting Cape Town from the ANC in elections last year and winning praise for her hands-on governance in a city previously plagued with inefficiency and corruption allegations.

?We must convince South Africans that our party is truly a home for all the people,? Zille said after two-thirds of the party elected her at its national congress near Johannesburg. ?We must create opportunities for new leaders to emerge so that our party looks and feels more like the nation we want to lead.?

Zille, born in Johannesburg to German parents, peppered her speech with Xhosa, the tongue of many black South Africans. She recalled that her experiences as a journalist during the apartheid era had shown her ?the danger of too much power in too few hands.?

?Politicians continue to use race and fears of racism to achieve selfish goals. The Democratic Alliance must push past the politics of identity and arrive at the politics of issues,? she said.

Ahead of the 2009 presidential elections in 2009, Zille hopes to exploit divisions within the ANC and its Communist and labor allies, and build on the alliances with smaller parties that have helped her resist fierce ANC challenges in Cape Town.

She only narrowly won the Cape Town election, but has since earned respect for a no-nonsense approach to improving service delivery in the tourist hub.

?She has bought more ethics to the job, and she is a fantastic personality,? said Adam Habib of South Africa?s Human Sciences Research Council. But Habib said the party would need to adopt policies more in tune with the needs of poor black voters to make significant electoral headway.

Since the fall of apartheid, the government has done much to improve living conditions for nonwhites. But millions still live in shacks without decent sanitation; unemployment is around 40 percent, despite an acute shortage of skilled workers; and all levels of government are bogged down by bureaucracy and inefficiency.

There is an emerging black middle class, but the biggest spoils from the vaunted Black Economic Empowerment policy have gone to a politically connected elite.