South Africa

By Bruce W. Nelan

Outside the tan stucco shoe-box house in a dusty corner of Soweto, bands of shouting youths draped the black, green and gold banner of the outlawed African National Congress over the driveway. Others hoisted a smaller version up a makeshift flagpole atop the roof. Inside, Walter Sisulu, 77, the liberation organization's former secretary-general, conferred by phone with the A.N.C.'s exiled leaders in Lusaka, Zambia. Then he walked across the street to an Anglican church that had been transformed into a meeting hall. Hundreds of supporters were gathered there, celebrating Sisulu's release from prison after serving more than 25 years of a life sentence for sabotage and plotting to overthrow the white government. As he and six other newly freed prisoners raised their clenched fists and shouted "Amandla" (power), the crowd roared back "Awethu" (is ours).

Banned since 1960, the A.N.C. vividly returned to the South African political stage last week. By releasing several A.N.C. leaders without restricting their activities, and by allowing their celebrations to take place unhindered, the government seemed to grant the group a sort of provisional legal status. The leaders will appear at an A.N.C. rally in Soweto this Sunday, the first such assembly to be permitted in 30 years. State President F.W. de Klerk was beginning to make good on the promise he made at his inauguration last month to ease tensions and move the country into a new era of negotiations. His action signaled his potential willingness to go even further -- to free Nelson Mandela, the symbolic leader of black nationalism, and to sit down for talks with the A.N.C., which for three decades has been dedicated to toppling the government by "armed struggle."

Like his colleagues in the A.N.C. and the Mass Democratic Movement, a coalition of antiapartheid organizations, Sisulu believed the government's nascent benevolence had been forced on it by domestic and international pressure as well as by its desire to avoid further economic sanctions. While no one from the government notified Sisulu's wife Albertina that he was to be released, De Klerk found time to telephone British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to tell her he was freeing a group of aging black leaders as she had urged him to do. Thatcher took that news with her to the Commonwealth conference in Kuala Lumpur last week, where she opposed all proposals for additional sanctions. This malleability was something new for Pretoria, however. "The classic Afrikaner response is never to be seen to be giving in to foreign pressure," says a Western diplomat. "De Klerk is showing much greater sensitivity."

Of all the pressures exerted on South Africa from abroad, perhaps the most sobering to Pretoria was the action of Western bankers, who in 1985 halted all new loans and demanded repayment of some $14 billion in short-term debt. South Africa has been paying back the loans ever since, but the export of so much capital has limited the country's economic growth. Last week the pressure was eased significantly. The South African Reserve Bank announced that it had negotiated a deal with its creditors to repay $1.5 billion through December 1993 and turn $6.5 billion into long-term credits. Antiapartheid campaigners attacked the arrangement as a sellout. "I deplore the collaboration of the banks with the evil system prevailing in South Africa," said Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu. "They give capitalism a bad name, and they close off peaceful avenues for bringing about fundamental change."

In a series of earlier gestures to outside opinion, De Klerk had ordered the police to stop using long plastic whips, called sjamboks, and to allow mass protests in public if they were peaceful. But those were changes in the enforcement of security rules, not political reforms. The new President is setting the stage for more substantive steps. On Saturday, for example, De Klerk announced that the government could lift the 1986 state of emergency and "unban" restricted organizations if they showed "by word and deed" that such moves would not lead to political unrest.

De Klerk has also appointed Gerrit Viljoen, 63, to the post of Minister of Constitutional Development, making him chief political negotiator with the black majority. Viljoen, a former professor and chairman of the secret Afrikaner society the Broederbond, said last week that by releasing Sisulu and other A.N.C. officials, the government was "testing the waters" to see if it could free Mandela without causing uncontrollable demonstrations.

Viljoen provided a large opening toward negotiations with the A.N.C. by rejiggering the ground rules on who could take part. Previously, the government had insisted that no organization could come to the table without renouncing the use of violence for political ends, something the A.N.C. still refuses to do. Now, said Viljoen, "we are trying to include as many people as possible, provided there is no threat of violence to back up positions at the negotiating table." This formula, dropping the demand for a formal renunciation, clears the way for A.N.C. participation.

The government casts its invitation even wider. "We are prepared to include in discussions all people working toward a peaceful solution," Viljoen stressed. Thus the A.N.C. would not be the government's sole negotiating partner -- a role it demands -- but would have to sit down with leaders of Pretoria-created black "homelands" and possibly members of black municipal councils, officials the A.N.C. calls "collaborators" with the apartheid system. This plan could lead to either a dilution of the organization's power at the bargaining table or the onus of failure if it refuses to take part in talks that include other black groups.

Cyril Ramaphosa, a leader of the Mass Democratic Movement, says Viljoen's proposal would cause the A.N.C. to "lose ground" if it were simply "one of many groups." Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, head of the 1.5 million-member Inkatha movement and an opponent of the A.N.C.'s socialist orientation, responds, "I shudder to think what would happen to South Africa if we all stood aside and allowed only one black party to negotiate the country's future." To try to hurdle this and other obstacles and preconditions, Viljoen suggests preliminary "talks about talks."

Other, more radical activists of the Pan-Africanist Congress, which is also banned, reject talks altogether. Jafta Masemola, a P.A.C. leader released with Sisulu, said, "We cannot negotiate with the usurpers of our land." While most black leaders agree that De Klerk has set off in a new direction, they remain skeptical because of the destination he has in mind. De Klerk's policy, fully endorsed by the ruling National Party, is one of constitutionally guaranteed "group rights" defined by race, including the right of whites to veto legislation they might consider threatening, to live in whites-only neighborhoods and to attend segregated schools. "Ethnic and cultural ; differences exist," says Viljoen, "and should be recognized in a new constitution."

At its core, the A.N.C. position is equally nonnegotiable, calling for a swift transfer of state power from whites to blacks. The exiled organization stands unwaveringly for one-person, one-vote majority rule in a unitary state. Such an arrangement is "unfair" and unacceptable, says De Klerk. "Afrikaners won't agree to that until they are militarily defeated," says a senior diplomat in Pretoria, "and the balance of power in the country right now does not favor revolution."

Leaders of the domestic Mass Democratic Movement are in a quandary: they tend to favor negotiations because the process might lead to government concessions that are unforeseen now, but they do not want to go to the table if their presence offers nothing but a public relations success for De Klerk by making him look like a peacemaker. Ramaphosa, head of the black National Union of Mineworkers, concedes that the government does appear to be seeking change. "One could say they are willing to usher in a new South Africa," he says, "but some of us have serious doubts because they are still talking about group rights. That to us is still apartheid." Even so, black leaders do not want to pass up what could be an opportunity. They understand that De Klerk is not simply going to hand over the government and that a step-by-step process is the only realistic approach. "But if we were to say that publicly," one leader admits, "it would have a devastating effect on our movement. It could demobilize our people."

After his release from prison, Sisulu said he had learned that "pressure" was the only way to make South Africa change, and that "the struggle in all its aspects" should continue. That remains the consensus among black leaders, who say that protests, boycotts and strikes will go on -- with the full blessing of Nelson Mandela -- and the A.N.C. will work to rebuild its organization inside South Africa. If De Klerk is to get negotiations on track, he will have to offer more concessions to prove that reconciliation rather than image building is his goal.

With reporting by Scott MacLeod/Johannesburg