At the Crossroads

By SCOTT MAC LEOD JOHANNESBURG

Mandela. The name reverberates like a mantra through South Africa these days, half in excitement, half in anxiety. Mandela will soon be free. Mandela will solve the problem. If Mandela can't do it, who can?

South Africa is at a crossroads. For the first time since the National Party came to power in 1948 and began introducing the laws of apartheid, or separateness, there exists a widespread acceptance of the need to change. With the exception of a diehard minority, most of South Africa's 5 million whites have gradually resigned themselves to the fact that they cannot continue forever to dominate 26 million blacks politically, economically and socially. Blacks, who have fought so ineffectually for almost 80 years, have come to feel that their long struggle has not been in vain. In the climate of flexibility fostered by the reform-minded government of State President F.W. de Klerk, the vast majority of South Africans expect a new kind of country to emerge. But the races are still far, far apart on what kind of country that will be.

In one of those astonishing ironies of history, many have invested their hopes in Nelson Mandela, the aged black revolutionary now endowed with almost mythic stature. Imprisoned for life for sedition, unseen and largely unheard from for more than 27 years, he is somehow expected to lead South Africa to salvation. But can any man perform that miracle? Is South Africa really ready to be led out of the wilderness of apartheid into the promised land of . . . of what? The black dream of a nonracial democratic society -- in short, black rule? Or something less, a revision of the old system in which white power would not be transferred but only shared, in effect preserving white rights and privileges?

If the current wave of hope has an epicenter, it is at the end of a dirt lane on the grounds of Victor Verster Prison Farm, 35 miles east of Cape Town, where Mandela remains confined. There, in a comfortable three-bedroom former warder's house overlooking the vineyards of the Franschhoek Valley, Mandela rises early each morning to begin another day of appointments. The government suggests that his freedom is imminent, but even while still behind a prison fence, Mandela is already playing his self-appointed role as "facilitator."

His choice of that word seems to indicate that he has accepted the job of wresting tangible results from this moment of opportunity. For three years Mandela has held periodic meetings with a team of government officials, and since November he has had sessions with Cabinet ministers as well as almost daily talks with anti-apartheid leaders to try to find a common meeting ground. The 71-year-old prisoner, still tall and distinguished looking, his smooth face barely lined, his black hair just flecked with gray, greets each visitor with a smiling embrace.

Mandela's unconditional release is widely regarded as the key to implementing the government's promises of reform. It is believed that if anyone can bridge the vast divides between whites and blacks, and among the blacks themselves, Mandela can. The white government looks on him as a born- again moderate, a "man you can negotiate with," as De Klerk himself decided. For blacks, Mandela may be the one who, as the personification of their long suffering, can help them transcend the disagreements over strategy and allegiance that have splintered their strength, and bargain on equal terms with the whites.

When he is freed, Mandela will walk out into a world vastly different from the strict apartheid society he vowed to overthrow. Starting with then Prime Minister P.W. Botha's warning in 1979 that whites must "adapt or die," the idea of changing national institutions and the realization that power should be shared with the black majority have moved into the mainstream. That change of attitude has been given real impetus in the five months since De Klerk was elected to succeed Botha. With a speed that surprised almost everyone, the new and little-known President made a series of conciliatory moves, unofficially lifting a 30-year restriction on mass protests, releasing several prominent political prisoners and giving restricted antiapartheid groups some leeway to operate.

But De Klerk's most important step was to begin a personal dialogue with Mandela, a revered leader of the African National Congress. The government wanted to speed up the "talks about talks," designed to get formal negotiations under way. On Dec. 13, at the presidential residence in Cape Town known as Tuynhuys, the two men held the first of a planned series of meetings on ways to convene an indaba (Zulu for "negotiations") that would write a new constitution granting blacks the right to vote for a national government. The meeting signaled that De Klerk, unlike his predecessors, was willing to negotiate with the outlawed 78-year-old A.N.C., which only months ago was still officially vilified as a band of terrorists.

The step was a huge psychological leap for the National Party. But, acknowledges Roelf Meyer, Deputy Minister for Constitutional Development, "there is no chance of a legitimate process of negotiations if only three- quarters of the players are around the table." Adds Education Minister Stoffel van der Merwe: "Mr. de Klerk has fully accepted that blacks, whoever they are, have a right to participate."

With expectations growing daily, antiapartheid leaders will be listening closely this Friday when De Klerk delivers his maiden state of the nation address to the opening session of Parliament in Cape Town. They want the President to outline a timetable for negotiations and to meet the main conditions blacks have laid down for participation: Mandela's release, an end to the 1986 state of emergency and the lifting of bans on antiapartheid organizations.

"Clearly," says U.S. Ambassador William Swing, who was a junior diplomat in South Africa in the mid-1960s, "there has not been a time in my association with this country that the prospects for a settlement along just lines have been as favorable." Yet Pretoria is notorious for its habit of taking two steps backward for every step forward. De Klerk is urging against unrealistic hopes. But if he fails to fulfill at least some of the expectations, he will risk a powerful backlash that could wreck any prospect for progress in the near future.

What private understandings, if any, De Klerk and Mandela may have already reached is a tightly guarded secret, but indications are that the two leaders have come to respect each other. "Mandela had the impression that De Klerk was a man he could do business with," said Azhar Cachalia, treasurer of the A.N.C.-allied United Democratic Front. "But he also made the point that history is not simply made by people who are good and honest. Whether the National Party as a whole will shirk its past, he is not able to say." For his part, De Klerk confided to colleagues that Mandela is "a man of integrity, a man you can trust."

Freedom will mark a great personal triumph for Mandela, who has repeatedly refused offers for his conditional release and never wavered from his demand for a multiracial South Africa based on a system of one man, one vote. When Botha announced in 1985 that Mandela could go free if he simply renounced the A.N.C.'s armed struggle, Mandela defiantly replied, "Let Botha show that he is different. I cannot and will not give any undertaking. Only free men can negotiate."

A year later, with South Africa reeling from two years of unrest that left 5,000 people dead, the government acceded to Mandela's request for top-level political talks, initially focusing on the release of political prisoners. But a historic 45-minute tea with Botha last July, the first and last meeting between the two men, seemed only to show how little they had to say to each other.

Following De Klerk's election, according to a Cabinet minister, the government's talks with Mandela took on real meaning. In October they worked out the release of eight political prisoners, including Walter Sisulu and other A.N.C. leaders who were convicted along with Mandela in the Rivonia treason trial a quarter-century earlier.

For the past three months, Mandela has pressed the government to meet the A.N.C.'s terms for negotiations. "He has told the government that he does not want to leave prison empty-handed," says one of Mandela's lawyers, Dullah Omar. "Otherwise, he would report to A.N.C. headquarters that three years of discussions have been a waste of time."

Mandela's busy life at Victor Verster contrasts sharply with the years of hard labor he endured on Robben Island, a penal colony across from Cape Town Harbor where he was incarcerated for nearly two decades. For the first ten years he swung a pickax in a limestone quarry, breaking boulders into gravel. But the harsh punishment only strengthened his resolve, and he directed his anger into a crusade for better prison conditions. "To us," says Steve Tshwete, an A.N.C. guerrilla leader imprisoned for 15 years, "he represented the correctness of our cause and the inevitability of our victory."

Mandela's talent for leadership traces back to his tribal heritage as the son of a royal family of the Thembu tribe of the Xhosa people. After earning a law degree from the University of the Witwatersrand, he joined the A.N.C. With classmate Oliver Tambo, he set up the first black law practice in South Africa in 1952. Defiantly working from a whites-only downtown neighborhood, they specialized in representing blacks who failed to carry the passes that were required of blacks in white neighborhoods.

Mandela and Tambo helped form the Youth League in 1944, and three years later drew up a program of action calling for strikes, boycotts and acts of civil disobedience. In 1955 they supported the Freedom Charter, an economic credo many considered to be socialist. But Mandela abandoned peaceful methods after the Sharpeville Massacre in 1960, in which police killed 69 black protesters. When Tambo left to establish a headquarters in exile, Mandela stayed behind to set up the A.N.C.'s underground military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) and launch a campaign of sabotage. After 17 months on the run, he was caught in 1962. He was convicted in June 1964 of attempting to overthrow the government along with seven others in the Rivonia trial. His sentence: life in prison.

In his years away, apartheid has acquired a more presentable face. The humiliating restrictions of petty apartheid have largely faded away. A sizable black middle class has sprung up, bringing with it consumer power that has not escaped the notice of white merchants. "Buppies" live in handsome Soweto neighborhoods like Diepkloof and drive their BMWs to work each day. Black businessmen make deals over lunch at trendy restaurants while being served by scurrying white waiters. Compared with blacks on the rest of the continent, many in South Africa live well. More, of course, do not.

But the main pillars of Hendrik Verwoerd's Grand Apartheid remain firmly in place, with no explicit commitment to remove them: the Population Registration Act still legally classifies people by race; the Group Areas Act still bars blacks from residing in most white neighborhoods or from sending their children to whites-only government schools; land acts dating back to 1913 and 1936 still reserve 87% of South Africa's land to whites, who today constitute 14% of the population.

Yet the issue is no longer really apartheid; it is political power. Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha explains that the government began to shift away from apartheid when the National Party realized that it was impossible to stem the tide of blacks moving to urban areas in search of employment. "As the economic realities overwhelmed the dream," he says, "so did we come to realize that there were consequences of these policies that were indeed oppressive and humiliating." Bowing to those realities, P.W. Botha scrapped the hated pass laws in 1986.

In another attempt to soften the face of apartheid, he had set up the tricameral Parliament in 1984. It established a strictly limited form of power sharing that for the first time included coloreds, or people of mixed race, and Indians, but not blacks. Whatever the failures of that system, Pik Botha insists, it at least helped condition the minds of whites "to see a man of color acting like a gentleman just like everybody else." By the time De Klerk ordered the removal of the remaining WHITES ONLY signs on South Africa's beaches just before the Christmas holidays, whites complained about "crude" black sunbathers but accepted the inevitable. As Christiaan Kirstein, 51, a corn farmer from the Orange Free State, said, "You can't keep the blacks down; you can't stop development."

However, the whites' commitment to reform stops short of entrusting their own destiny to any other than white hands. If apartheid as a method has failed to protect their rights and privileges, whites will find another, more palatable way to retain them. De Klerk has put the position squarely a number of times: "White domination must end, but we are not prepared to exchange it for black domination."

In practical terms, that means something far less than the black demand for a nonracial democratic system based on one man, one vote, which would transfer power from whites to blacks. The National Party is willing to accept only a partial sharing of power on the basis of what it calls group rights, under which each racial group would decide its own affairs on the basis of self- administration.

What the carefully coded words mean, in effect, is a system of separate but equal parliaments, neighborhoods and schools, a form of private rather than government segregation. At the local level, the group-rights concept would permit whites to live much as they do now. At the national level, it would require a cumbersome system of multiple lawmaking bodies ruling on narrow issues, with some sort of mechanism to settle issues of common interest that would allow the minority white community to retain a disproportionate share of power. Whites may be willing to go further than before toward accommodating black demands, but not all the way to a fully integrated society.

Despite the white limits to reform, De Klerk has managed to create a climate of optimism and opportunity with his language of conciliation, moderation and flexibility. His constant emphasis on negotiations and on finding a peaceable resolution of racial differences has won domestic support and international approval. It has also confronted black organizations with a host of thorny questions about how to adapt their strategies and whether to trust their old enemies. Much of the antiapartheid movement has been caught off balance and disorganized. Under the emergency, government policy effectively shackled them: 30 organizations were banned, hundreds of leaders were jailed or severely restricted from engaging in political activism, protests and demonstrations were forbidden, and the police presence in the townships squelched most rioting. The violent liberation movement guided by the A.N.C.-in-exile was virtually moribund.

More troubling, the prospect of negotiations has brought to the surface intense differences within the black community over how -- or even whether -- to proceed. Despite their overwhelming superiority of numbers, South African blacks pay allegiance to half a dozen movements with divergent goals and ideologies. All will settle for no less than black majority rule, but each has a different notion of how to obtain it. The A.N.C. commands the largest following, especially among the politically active young, urban, working and middle class. Yet many are uncertain about subscribing to the old socialist rhetoric that still colors A.N.C. pronouncements. Many more are doubtful about continuing the "armed struggle," which the A.N.C. has yet to disavow. Nevertheless, the A.N.C. has long demanded the sole right to represent the country's disenfranchised.

That right is challenged by 1.5 million Zulus, who pledge their loyalty to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. He claims an equal right to participate in any negotiations, and has kept close ties to Mandela personally. But Buthelezi's Inkatha movement is suspect to many blacks for its history of cooperation with the government. The A.N.C. despises Buthelezi as a white puppet, and violent rivalry between the two organizations over the past two years has left more than 1,200 blacks dead. Also at odds with the nonracial A.N.C. is the much smaller Pan Africanist Congress, whose slogan is Africa for the Africans. But its main disagreement is over tactics: the P.A.C. does not believe blacks can get a fair deal in negotiations when all the weight is with the whites. The P.A.C. refuses to countenance talks and wants to keep up the struggle until the whites surrender.

While the P.A.C. has limited grass-roots support, its vow to fight to the end is endorsed by radical elements in the A.N.C. Mandela's biggest challenge may come from within the A.N.C., where some in the new generation of leaders resent his automatic resumption of leadership and consider him too willing to compromise. One of the most powerful of the younger figures, Cyril Ramaphosa, the 37-year-old general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, declared that Mandela's status "was no different from the status of any other member." Others were angered by Mandela's presumption in initiating a personal dialogue with De Klerk. Mandela's first and quite daunting task will be to end this black disunity.

The white community is also divided. Polls indicate that De Klerk is slightly ahead of the white population at large in pushing for reform. Fully 31% of whites voted for the breakaway Conservative Party, the bastion of the verkramptes, or ultraconservatives. They object to any form of power sharing and resist not just negotiations but all attempts to pare the laws of segregation. At worst, they talk of secession and partition, retreating to a smaller but still pure Afrikaner land where whites would dominate. While the conservatives probably cannot block De Klerk from pursuing reform, their reactionary attitudes act as a heavy drag on attempts at compromise. The challenge for De Klerk is to build enough white support for each step as he inches ahead.

For now, the first one is to convene the indaba. According to Gerrit Viljoen, who as Minister for Constitutional Development is the government's chief negotiator, De Klerk's sole precondition for A.N.C. participation is a "peaceful commitment to a negotiated resolution." That is something the A.N.C. has yet to address definitively. Two weeks ago, the A.N.C. national executive in Lusaka adopted a platform, based on a ten-point plan sent by Mandela through intermediaries, affirming the group's commitment to negotiations and offering a truce if De Klerk meets its conditions for talks.

If the great indaba finally does begin, it could founder all too quickly because the fundamental aims of the two main parties are so far apart. Stripped to their most basic positions, the A.N.C. says it will settle for no less than one man, one vote, black majority rule, while the government demands that an equal share of power for whites be written into the constitution. But the A.N.C. flatly rejects any political system based on racial groups. According to Mandela's lawyers, he has told the government he remains committed "to a single nonracial democratic South Africa with a single Parliament on a common franchise."

Both sides are going out of their way to sound flexible, but how much give is there on either part? Viljoen says the government is prepared to negotiate everything, including its proposal for "group rights," but few believe the whites would give up that demand. A.N.C. leaders have acknowledged a need to somehow provide protections for minorities. But, says Thabo Mbeki, the group's foreign minister, "we will argue that group rights are the same as apartheid."

Perhaps the only realistic outcome at this time is a transitional one, to what one deeply involved Western diplomat calls a "zebra-striped government." Says he: "Power sharing with a real share for the blacks is definitely on offer in the next phase. A surrender of white power is not." But, he adds, once that first hurdle is surmounted, South Africa will be poised for the final jump. "The next constitution," says this diplomat, "will not be the ultimate constitution."

Yet it is far from clear that either side is ready to abandon its maximum demands. Says Lawrence Schlemmer, director of Johannesburg's Center for Policy Studies: "What normally precipitates conflict resolution is a need to limit damage." But South Africa is not in a desperate crisis, and neither the government nor the A.N.C. is feeling enough pressure to make concessions on vital issues.

Mandela is the sole black leader in South Africa who has a chance to bring both sides to compromise. Despite his advancing years and his near fatal bout with tuberculosis in 1988, he was described by a visitor to Victor Verster as "very nimble, alert, self-confident, charismatic, not a mere symbolic leader but someone who is in touch with events." Few others possess the pragmatism that Mandela has honed over the years, which may enable him to grow from a facilitator of negotiations to a reconciler of men.

Yet despite his avowed eagerness to engage in talks, the going has proved bumpy. After Winnie Mandela visited her husband last Saturday, she emerged despondent. Complications had arisen, she said, that might delay her husband's freedom. "It is quite clear," said Mrs. Mandela, "that problems have cropped up about his immediate release."

Whatever the government's cause for hesitation, Mandela has none. Newspapers last week published the text of a document he had delivered to the government prior to his tea with Botha last July. In it he urged both the A.N.C. and the government to "meet urgently to negotiate an effective political settlement." But he also made it clear exactly where he stood. "White South Africa," he wrote, "must accept the plain fact that the A.N.C. will not suspend, to say nothing of abandoning, the armed struggle until the government agrees to negotiate" with recognized black leaders. In addition, wrote Mandela, white South Africans will have to "accept that there will never be peace and stability in this country" until the principle of majority rule is accepted. The distance between these demands and De Klerk's offer to negotiate a division of political power could be too great for even Nelson Mandela to bridge.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Nigel Holmes

CAPTION: SCRAMBLING FOR SEATS

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town