South Africa "We Live with Danger Every Day"

Less than 24 hours after South Africa's commando raid last week, it was business as usual at the whitewashed single-story headquarters of the African National Congress in downtown Lusaka. An A.N.C. official glanced only casually at visitors as they passed through the half-open steel gate. Within the compound, Oliver Tambo, 68, a lawyer and political activist who became acting president of the organization in 1967, sat inside a cramped and sparsely furnished office, drafting a press statement about the attack. None of the 20 or so staffers on hand seemed unduly alarmed by the raid. "We live with danger every day," shrugged Tom Sebina, an A.N.C. spokesman.

Founded in 1912 by a group of middle-class Africans lobbying nonviolently for civil rights in British-ruled South Africa, the A.N.C. abandoned pacifism during the unrest that followed the 1960 killing of 69 blacks at Sharpeville. In 1964 Nelson Mandela, the leader of its militant wing, was found guilty of sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment, and, a little later, the banned A.N.C. set up a government-in-waiting in newly independent Zambia. Today a few hundred A.N.C. employees coordinate cultural projects, run a radio station and even manage a high-tech 10,000-acre farm on which they grow food to feed their forces. Meanwhile, an estimated 10,000 fighters are trained, apparently by East German and other advisers, in northern Angola. For their ideological education, the rebels go to the Marxist-leaning Solomon Mahlangu College in Tanzania.

Though the A.N.C. is partly financed by the Soviet Union and often works closely with the South African Communist Party, it also welcomes non-Marxists. Some of its support comes from such groups as the British Labor Party, the Swedish government and the World Council of Churches.

Ever since its formation, the A.N.C. has remained unwavering in its agitation for a multiracial democracy in South Africa. During the past 18 months of turbulence, however, the outlawed movement has stepped up its activities, both subversive and diplomatic. Last year it decided to extend guerrilla operations to South African civilian areas, including white suburbs. Its first such strike, a bomb set off in a shopping center near Durban last December, left five people dead. The new strategy coincided with the creation of a broader- based leadership, as the previously all-black national executive committee expanded its membership to 30 when, for the first time ever, it elected a white, two Indians and two mixed-race coloreds. In recent months the movement's leaders in Lusaka have also received a steady succession of visitors from South Africa, including churchmen, opposition politicians and businessmen.

Inevitably, however, the A.N.C.'s presence within South Africa remains mostly symbolic. Many observers note that the exiled movement is somewhat out of touch with the militant black youths of the townships. Not only is the A.N.C. geographically removed from the action, but its top leaders, who are mainly in their 60s, are 30 or more years older than most of the radical blacks now spoiling for violent revolution. That distance has sparked some resentment. Said Peter Abe, an 18-year-old from Soweto who recently visited Lusaka: "While we daily risk brutal death, whippings, mutilation and torture, these A.N.C. officials drive around in fine cars, take long trips abroad and have life-styles like those of the middle class in South Africa."

Nonetheless, the banners and slogans of the outlawed movement serve as a powerful and convenient symbol for blacks shouting their anger at white- minority rule. At almost every gathering in South African townships, the A.N.C.'s green, yellow and black colors are displayed before the authorities as an act of defiance. Thus the exiled movement still remains a shadowy presence in South Africa, at once everywhere and nowhere.