Birth of a Nation

By LANCE MORROW

When history delivers something that looks like a miracle (the fall of the Berlin Wall, for example, or the collapse of Soviet communism), the mind experiences a kind of electricity, the thrill of beginning, of seeing a new world. That was what it felt like last week to watch South Africa. Here was a spectacle of true transformation.

For the first time, South Africans of all races were citizens. Apartheid was gone, reduced to rubble, as if in one of those slow-motion demolitions that bring down massive, obsolete monstrosities to make way for new construction.

But if the miracle brought forth by Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk was abundantly welcome, and long overdue, it also looked dangerous. A thousand | possibilities (brilliant or ominous, best of times or worst of times) attended the birth of the new South Africa. Jubilation and anxiety flashed around the imagination like manifestations of weather in a Shakespeare tragedy.

In the sunniest version of South Africa's destiny, the country, being the strongest economy in Africa, will begin to lead the continent into the 21st century. But everyone's mind entertained a dark, simultaneous vision of disintegration: of economic disaster and tribal war. Images of Rwanda's Tutsi and Hutu hacking one another to death in inconceivable numbers stayed on the retina, a kind of warning. Africa, after all, has a talent for apocalypses -- droughts and famines, annihilating plagues and slaughters. Still, even the occasional apocalypse is not necessarily a continent's final destiny. Europe's history too has been, at intervals, a medley of famine, plague and tribal butchery bureaucratized up to genocide.

The economic and political undertow in Africa these days is very fierce: young nations are gasping and going under. In some sense the leadership of a politically and economically successful South Africa may be the continent's last chance. The elections did not encourage the uglier projections. In fact, the week in South Africa was unusually peaceful. The moment seemed to represent a triumph of patience and forbearance and political wisdom.

In the late 20th century, the world's peoples seem to be engaged in a chaotic and often dangerous migration toward democracy. Race antagonism is surely the bitterest, most atavistic obstacle in the way of that procession. South Africa has now formally dismantled the barrier. But of course, the more formidable wall is in the human heart.