South Africa The Front Line Begins to Wobble

By BRUCE W. NELAN JOHANNESBURG

Much as the black-ruled nations of Africa might detest it, they cannot ignore the fact that the pariah state of South Africa is the economic and military superpower south of the Sahara. This galling reality is the backdrop against which State President P.W. Botha is staging a new diplomatic offensive. In three weeks he has met publicly with three African heads of state and secretly, officials in Pretoria claim, with two others. Flying home from Zaire last week, Botha announced jubilantly, "We are going to other African countries as well, where we will be busy this year and next year." Replacing his usual glower with a grin, he said, "Africa is talking to South Africa."

That is precisely the point. By talking to Botha, black leaders considered implacable enemies of apartheid provide him with a political breakthrough. They handshake him out of isolation and invest him with the credentials of international respectability. Televised images of black leaders welcoming him to their lands bolster his ritual argument: southern Africa is an interlocking unit that cannot hope to solve its problems without South Africa's wealth and skills. More immediately, the visible evidence that black African states are cooperating with him helps Botha undermine the sanctions campaign in the U.S. and Europe. "Allegations that South Africa is a destabilizing and disruptive force in southern Africa," he argued last week, "are therefore not true."

Botha's promise to stop destabilizing neighboring states is one reward black nations can anticipate in return for their hospitality. South Africa also doles out large-scale development loans and credits, which all its neighbors need, and carries on semicovert trade with more than 40 other African countries.

Those levers furnish Pretoria with plenty of coercive power when it chooses to exercise it. But the catalyst for this current burst of public summitry is the prospective agreement for the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and finally the granting of independence to Namibia, now near consummation in Brazzaville. Many states in the area are just as eager as South Africa to speed the departure of 50,000 Cuban troops from Angola as a prelude to ending the 13-year Angolan civil war between the Marxist government and South African-backed UNITA rebels. The attraction of sharing credit for bringing peace to southern Africa is exerting a magnetic pull on leaders who would not otherwise associate with Pretoria.

At the same time, Botha must prove to skittish white citizens at home that there is a payoff for his initiatives. Last August he pulled the South African Defense Force out of Angola. He has agreed to a Nov. 1 deadline to set in motion the long-delayed independence process for Namibia. Afrikaner skeptics are muttering that independence for "South West," as they call Namibia, will just bring another Marxist government to power on South Africa's borders. Botha is using coverage of his road-show triumphs to counteract angry charges of "surrender" from the right-wing Conservative Party, which threatens to score large gains in national municipal elections on Oct. 26.

Botha's problem is how to maintain this fall's diplomatic momentum. He has skillfully orchestrated his parade into those African countries that are particularly vulnerable to South African pressure and blandishments. But he has yet to persuade the leaders of the key front-line states that his journeys offer more than cosmetic change. If anything, Pretoria's state of emergency is more repressive to antiapartheid forces now than it was two years ago. Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, a voluble foe of "the Boers," said stiffly, "I don't know who else Botha will meet. I have no appointment with Botha." Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, who had talks with the South African leader in 1982, demanded preconditions before talking again. There would be "no more meeting with him at all," he said, until Botha delivered on his promises of peace with his neighbors and independence for Namibia.

Such a comprehensive settlement would almost certainly open more doors in Africa to him. It would probably blunt the sanctions drive in Europe and America. It might even be enough to launch the regional heads-of-government conference that Botha wants so much to attend. A senior British diplomat observes that the front line is holding firm now, "but it is beginning to wobble." In the meantime, Botha can count on two more summits in coming months when Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Mozambique's Joaquim Chissano pay the return visits they have promised. Yet the real payoff in authentic black-white harmony for the continent will require a more sustained journey than the fleeting visits Botha has made so far.