A LAND SINGING TWIN ANTHEMS

By Richard Stengel

Once known as Libertas, the presidential mansion in Pretoria is now officially named Mahlamba'ndlopfu (Dawn of a New Era) in Shangaan. The Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging region, South Africa's industrial heart, is now simply called Gauteng (Place of Gold) in Sotho. The Hendrik Verwoerd Dam (named for the architect of apartheid) has become the Gariep Dam, gariep being an ancient African word for wilderness.

Some might say that in the year since Nelson Mandela became President, only the names have changed in the new South Africa, that the blacks in their shantytowns and the whites in their high-walled suburban homes live no differently than they did before. And, of course, there would be truth to that, for the lives of most South Africans have not altered materially. But anyone who has spent more than an afternoon in the old apartheid South Africa, anyone who has visited even for a week the grim, oppressive, lopsided country run by ironfisted Afrikaners in Homburg hats, anyone who knew it then and sees it now knows the country is utterly altered. A year of freedom has filled blacks and whites alike with pride, with a sense of renewal and, most important, hope.

Yes, it is true that Mandela's government of national unity has so far built fewer than 1,000 of the 1 million houses it promised to construct in five years. It is also true that the unemployment rate among blacks remains at 41% and that the whites still own 75% of the land, although they make up only 13% of the population. But it is not by numbers that the new South Africa must be measured; rather it is by the psychological sea change that this long-troubled land has undergone.

In the run-up to the polling, hundreds were dying in clashes between Mandela's African National Congress and its Zulu rival, the Inkatha Freedom Party. On election eve, bombs set by white extremists shook Johannesburg. Civil war seemed all too possible. Yet one year later, blacks and whites feel released from a 350-year-old burden. "I am excited, relieved," says Phambili Gama, a black engineer in Johannesburg. "Psychologically we feel liberated, even if many economic changes are still to be realized." Beverley Dalton, a white Cape Town public relations executive, puts it more directly: "My world is blacker-and better. The tension has gone out of our lives." Now at national gatherings, A.N.C. leaders can be heard singing the Boers' beloved Die Stem (The Call), while at rugby matches, thick-necked Afrikaans players stand at attention for the black liberation and nationalist hymn Nkosi Sikelel i Afrika (God Bless Africa).

Twin national anthems are emblematic of Mandela's Masakhane campaign (masakhane is an Nguni word meaning "Let us build each other") to achieve national reconciliation. The campaign, in part, is an effort by the A.N.C. to end the culture of protest among blacks that the party once encouraged. The results have been heartening. Before the election, 80% of the residents of Soweto, the teeming black township near Johannesburg, refused to pay their electricity bills. Today nearly 70% pay them. In the 1970s Ezekial Morailane, a school-bus driver, began withholding his rent to the Soweto Council for his matchbox house. Today he pays it regularly and is even working off his debt. "Now that the country is in the hands of the rightful people," he says, "I'll sweep the streets of Johannesburg if they ask me."

None of this would have been possible without Nelson Mandela. He is South Africa's George Washington, the revolutionary turned President who has overseen the birth of a nation. His popularity is phenomenal. Eighty-three percent of urban blacks say he is doing well, while 55% of whites agree. In November 1993, almost four years after his release from prison and five months before South Africa's first democratic elections, Mandela's approval rating among whites stood at a mere 4%. In fact, today Mandela is more vital to white hopes than black, for among whites he is the indispensable man, the Grand Reconciler. Whites look at the economic wreckage elsewhere on the continent and say, There but for the grace of Nelson Mandela goes South Africa.

He has softened the hearts of his countrymen, but Mandela has concrete accomplishments as well. Every day, more than 5 million pupils at nearly 13,000 schools are receiving a peanut-butter sandwich for lunch-a free meal that provides 25% of their nutritional needs. The children call them Mandela sandwiches. Electricity has been brought to 370,000 homes. Health care is now free for all pregnant women and for children under six.

Mandela and his colleagues have also had practical success managing the economy. For most of its history, the A.N.C. stood by its bible, the Freedom Charter, which called for the nationalization of Big Business and the redistribution of wealth. Now the socialists in Mandela's Cabinet talk of shrinking government and privatization. For the time being, the government is subscribing to the free-market philosophy that the best way to redistribute wealth is to create it; and the best way to create it is to save money, not spend it.

The early efforts seem to have been rewarded. The A.N.C. took over an economy eviscerated by nearly two decades of sanctions and siege-mentality policies. But in 1994 South Africa's gross domestic product grew 2.3%, the largest increase in five years. Meanwhile, inflation has been running below 10%. In the 1980s fretful whites and jittery foreign investors shipped $16 billion out of the country; in the last half of 1994, however, capital inflows reached $2.4 billion, a stream of funds that will undoubtedly accelerate now that the government has jettisoned complex currency regulations that deterred foreign investors. Last year fixed-capital investment grew 7%.

What sets South Africa apart from other experiments in democracy is the deliberateness with which it has engineered its own transformation. The government might have chosen showy spending -- and perhaps should have, in the case of building houses and medical clinics -- but as Jay Naidoo, the minister responsible for the all-important Reconstruction and Development Program, puts it, "The question is, How do we make this sustainable?" Naidoo patiently explains that in order to do anything, every apartheid regulation had to be rewritten. "Time has been spent on putting mechanisms into place," he says.

Optimism cannot paper over the country's problems, however. Political violence is disappearing, but good old-fashioned crime has more than filled the vacuum, making South Africa one of the most violent countries on earth, with a murder rate six times that of the U.S.'s. Moreover, some A.N.C. officials have been accused of corruption. Wary foreign investors say that while South Africa has an excellent infrastructure and a sophisticated banking system, its work force -- at least compared with Asia's-is undereducated, overpaid and too politicized.

The paramount concern remains the enormous gap in wealth and power between whites and blacks. Whites still control most of the principal institutions of South African society: the corporations, the banks, the stock exchange, the media and the civil service. While Mandela has urged a color-blind society and railed against "reverse racism," whites mutter about blacks taking jobs they are not qualified for. Whether blacks have the right curriculum vitae does not really matter: affirmative action in some form is imperative and inevitable. In South Africa, unlike in America, disenfranchised blacks make up the great majority of the population, and it will be impossible to create and sustain a modern economy without including them.

Mandela's treatment of white South Africans provokes one of the most acute criticisms of his government. Some have accused Mandela of bending too far to assuage white anxieties at the expense of black aspirations. The queen of these populist detractors is Mandela's estranged wife Winnie. When Mandela fired her from a Cabinet post for criticizing the government, there was fear that she might incite a breakaway movement within the A.N.C. In fact, the incident rallied party stalwarts around the President. Winnie found herself with no one willing to defend her.

At the moment, most ordinary blacks seem content to wait, to simply appreciate a government that after all these years represents them. They do not expect BMWs in the driveways tomorrow. But they will not wait forever. Houses must be built. Jobs must be created. Land-the seismic fault running through South African history-must be redistributed. If black discontent rises, there is little doubt that the middle-of-the-road government will swerve to the left, not the right.

Last week Cyril Ramaphosa, the secretary-general of the A.N.C., was driving to a meeting in one of the impoverished townships near Johannesburg region. The road was so pockmarked it was hardly passable. "Even before building 10,000 houses," he says, "people must begin to see that something is happening to repair that road. Unless they see some demonstration of change in their lives, we are going to lose those people."

There is a saying frequently heard in the townships these days: "A child that is just born cannot be expected to run." But that child should at least be walking one of these days-and it will be. --Reported by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town, Scott MacLeod/Pretoria and Mark Suzman/Johannesburg

With reporting by PETER HAWTHORNE/CAPE TOWN, SCOTT MACLEOD/PRETORIA AND MARK SUZMAN/JOHANNESBURG