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By Barbara Rudolph

When the deal was finally done, exhausted negotiators jumped to their feet and burst into applause. After weeks of debate and wrangling, representatives of South Africa's political parties, black and white, agreed last week to create a 20-member, multiracial, multiparty transition council -- with blacks in the majority -- to supervise the existing government until free elections are held on April 27. For the first time, the watchdog council will give 30 million black South Africans a measure of power and legitimacy within the country's political system; its installation, perhaps as soon as the middle of October, will definitively mark the end of 45 years of white rule. "It is a historic moment," said Cyril Ramaphosa, secretary-general of the African National Congress. "This is one of the final steps in bringing down the edifice of apartheid."

By no coincidence, another important step is expected almost simultaneously. After the white-dominated Parliament approves the transitional council this week -- no difficulty is predicted -- the A.N.C. has promised it will call for the termination of international economic sanctions. South Africa's painful 30-year isolation from the world community will finally come to an end. Anticipating that moment, A.N.C. president Nelson Mandela last week made an urgent plea for foreign firms to help repair the wreckage of the long antiapartheid struggle. "We need massive investment," he told a group of South African businessmen in Cape Town. Lifting sanctions, Mandela said, would be "an important psychological step" toward renewal.

Ideologues and historians will long debate the role that sanctions played in bringing an end to the white-dominated state, but there is no doubt the ban took a heavy economic toll. Most member countries of the United Nations levied formal bans against South African investment, prohibitions that were buttressed in the U.S. by similar bans on the part of 179 localities and states. Even after George Bush proclaimed the formal end of U.S. sanctions in 1991, many of those strictures remained in place. Countless private firms also decided to wait until they received an official go-ahead from the A.N.C. Experts estimate that sanctions have cost South Africa $27 billion in trade and investment.

But will those who fought so long to close off the spigot have the same success at opening it back up? Even with Nelson Mandela's imprimatur, money is unlikely to come gurgling into South Africa soon. First investors will want to weigh the risks and prospects on the new political landscape. "Like others, we're reading the tea leaves before we decide what to do," said a spokesman for IBM, which sold its operations to a local concern known as ISM in 1987. The most intimidating hurdle that prospective investors face is the continuing level of factional violence, most of it black against black. Only a day after the pact on the transitional council was reached, another random outbreak shattered the night in Johannesburg. In two separate attacks, gunmen with automatic weapons sprayed buses loaded with homeward-bound black commuters, killing 21. The toll of factional violence has reached 1,500 deaths since 1990.

Along with political bloodshed, the amount of serious crime -- murder, rape and armed robbery -- has almost doubled in the past six years. Nearly 1,000 South Africans apply for gun licenses every day. "What's the use of South Africa getting its credibility back in the world if all the world can hear from us is the rattle of an AK-47?" asks Jonathan Brown, a Johannesburg engineer. "What's the use if all we can offer is a wasteland?"

! Then there are the economic barriers. South Africa has been in recession for four years -- a condition undoubtedly worsened by sanctions as well as by a steep fall in the international price of gold and precious metals. The economy has been contracting since 1990, while the country wallows in $17 billion worth of short-term debt. The unemployment rate hovers at 48% -- hardly a siren call for investors. A.N.C. leaders have further unsettled foreign and domestic corporations with talk of nationalizing key industries and levying hefty new taxes on the rich -- meaning whites. Skeptics point to the tepid response after 1991, when Europe and the U.S. lifted their formal bans on South African investment. One reason for the minimal interest among U.S. and other business planners is that with the collapse of communism, the economic boom in China and the new religion of free-market economics in Latin America, they have a lot of options to choose from. Says a European Community official in Brussels: "Investment doesn't flow just because politicians tell it to."

That could change after the April elections. For one thing, a key residual sanction will be dissolved: a U.S. veto over International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans to South Africa. That change will move the country back into the fold of legitimate borrowers and help alleviate the internal financial crisis. It will also give the go-ahead to private banks and financial institutions to resume lending. For their part, A.N.C. leaders have lately been toning down statist economic talk and have started hoisting the banner of profitability. Trevor Manuel, the A.N.C.'s chief economic planner, told a group of executives last week that "there is money to be made here." The A.N.C. will propose new tax incentives to foreign investors after the April elections, he suggested, provided companies offer benefits and training programs for workers.

Finally, there is the lure of the country itself. With its established industrial base, sophisticated telecommunications system, excellent airports, rails and roads, South Africa is still the economic powerhouse of Africa. Under multiracial rule it will be a nation of 40 million consumers and the keystone of a southern continental region encompassing the black-ruled countries farther north. Service and consumer industries will probably succumb to that lure first: they have the least to lose, compared with manufacturing firms, and the most to gain quickly. But only if South Africa's violence subsides. Unless that happens, the long-awaited gush of investment is likely to remain a trickle.

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town and Jay Peterzell/ Washington