BEATING PANGAS INTO PLOUGHSHARES

South Africa's black population, unlike that of other African countries, has gained its independence at

exactly the right moment, argues John Simpson Durban THIS HAS been the most important week in South Africa's history: more important than the establishment of apartheid in 1948, or the Treaty of Vereeniging in 1902 Which gave Britain control over the Boer republics, or the Great Trek itself. This week, Africa has repossessed the last and greatest white colony on its territory.

It has also been a nervous time. While I have been writing these words there have been three bomb explosions across the country, and my television crew and I keep the windows open in case one goes off here in Durban. Yet this is not the civil war Which so many people outside the country seemed to expect. A car bomb may kill half-a-dozen people, but it has not been remotely enough to stop the constitutional Process from continuing. In the streets both here and in Johannesburg, people have remained calm. It is always a surprise, given the way apartheid treated the black Population of the country, that they are not more resentful to whites now. The new South Africa may have provided them with a vote worth as much as that of any white Person; but the old South Africa taught them to behave with instinctive courtesy to Whites, and this remains even though politi- cal power has migrated across the colour- line.

In 1964, when he was tried for the apartheid-era crime of treason and found guilty on evidence which even the West Midlands Crime Squad might have had qualms about, Nelson Mandela maintained from the dock that he did not want to see black majority rule in South Africa, but merely majority rule; this in a country of nearly 30 million adults, where only three- and-a-half million could vote. Thirty years later, he has kept to the principle. He and his closest colleagues in the ANC leader- ship are clear about the need to avoid the domination of whites by blacks, after the years in which blacks were dominated by Whites.

Yet it cannot be forgotten that the ANC has its nastier side. No one has ever been Properly punished for the imprisonment and torture that went on in some ANC camps in exile. Mandela's former wife Win- nie, a convicted kidnapper given to appalling outbursts, is well placed to win a seat in the new Government of National Unity: she is too popular for the party to be able to drop her. Peter Mokaba, an excitable former student leader, is likely to be the new minister of tourism. He invent- ed the slogan 'Kill the Boer, kill the farmer', which certainly has more impact than 'Come to sunny Cape Town'. Nowa- days he wears suits and thinks in grander terms, so he probably realises that the panga is not a good draw for tourism; but there would have been fewer signs of ner- vousness in the white community — the hoarding of food, the squirrelling away of money in foreign bank accounts — if such characters had been purged from the ANC's list.

The pulling down of the old South African tricolour, with its fussy compro- mise design in the centre, and its replace- ment by an even greater compromise (which the less reverent whites have nick- named 'the electric Y-fronts' because of the configuration of its six bands of colour), was the moment when the old sys- tem passed away and the black population was emancipated from its white overlords.

The question is now the terms on which the whites will remain here. If this were 1960s Nigeria or Ghana, the white adminis- trators would simply pack and go home, and the white shopkeepers and business- men would gradually give up the unequal struggle against decay and corruption. The obvious difference in South Africa is that several million white people here have nowhere else to go. Any rational govern- ment here will need them; and Nelson Mandela's problem is how best to use their skills in order to raise the living standards of the tens of millions of blacks who have now been enfranchised.

There may not have been a physical rev- olution in South Africa, but a revolution in people's expectations is already starting, and will present the new government with its greatest problem. It scarcely seems a good omen that the ANC's closest partner is the South African Communist Party, with its partiality for taking the property of one part of the population to hand out to the rest; still, it would be a mistake to assume that South Africa is now about to go the way of the rest of black Africa.

Most of Britain's African possessions were given their independence between 1960 and 1966. It was done in a shameful hurry, for fear of the United Nations and at the impatient prompting of the United States. The Colonial Office had planned for independence in Africa at the end of the century; instead, countries like Zambia found themselves alone in the world with a few dozen university graduates from which to create a government, a financial base and a judicial system, and with the infras- tructure of a colony rather than a nation. Not surprisingly, graft showed itself very quickly; within 18 months in the case of Ghana. Nigeria's pattern of corrupt civilian rule tempered by ferocious army takeovers began within four years. Such home-grown industry as there was was either neglected or nationalised.

South Africa's black population, by con- trast, has reached independence at precise- ly the time Britain once envisaged for its African colonies: the mid-1990s. Under apartheid, black universities like Fort Hare were starved of resources by comparison with the universities for white students, but the teaching was often good and there were even years when by some miscalculation the South African government spent more on its black undergraduates than on its white ones. Now there are hundreds of thousands of well-qualified black men and women in this country, and there will soon be almost as many black managers in busi- ness and industry as there are white ones. Under programmes of affirmative action, first introduced covertly in government agencies in 1986, blacks have been promot- ed in areas ranging from nuclear energy and the law to banking and broadcasting.

The black middle class is growing at a rate unexampled anywhere except in the United States during the 1970s; last year the sales of BMW cars to blacks came with- in hailing distance of those to whites. This is no longer a society where colour automatically divides rich from poor, man- agers from employees, educated from uneducated.

In politics, however, the old divisions are still almost as clear as ever. Most whites, 'coloureds' and Indians will have voted for F.W. de Klerk's National Party; most blacks will have voted for Nelson Man- dela's ANC. Yet even here one has to be cautious. The failure of the opinion poll- sters in Britain to forecast the result of the 1992 election arose because so many peo- ple were embarrassed to say out loud that they planned to vote Conservative. In South Africa not many conservative-mind- ed blacks will have been willing to announce that in the secrecy of the polling- booth they would vote for de Klerk; yet it will certainly have happened.

Mr de Klerk is not a political visionary; if he had been, he would not have supported apartheid or the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela so long and so vociferously. Nev- ertheless, he has grasped that there is only one way for white people to keep a link with political power in this country: the National Party will have to win mass sup- port. During his now famous television debate with Nelson Mandela I asked de Klerk if he hadn't betrayed his promises to the white voters; in the course of a ram- bling answer, he said he expected the National Party to win the next election after this one. Hustings hype, of course; but it showed the direction his mind was tak- ing. If South Africa can create a two-party system for itself, with the ANC on the Left and the NP on the Right, that will be an extraordinarily important achievement.

What is clear is that the National Party is not going to follow the path of the Rhode- sian Front after 1980: tolerated in the par- liament of the new Zimbabwe for a few years in order to give the whites a breath- ing-space. As black rule developed, the Front became sourer and sourer, sniping at the effrontery and corruption of the coun- try's new masters. It can never have occurred seriously to anyone that the Front might try to attract black voters. Those of us who observed the last days of Rhodesia believed at that time that the mildness of the British colonial tradition would make things easier and more flexible in Zimbab- we than they could ever be in rigid, Afrikaner-dominated South Africa. 'When things start to change down there, it'll real- ly blow,' we used to say, anticipating bloody revolution. It would have seemed unthink- able that serious political change might be set in train by a party led by the saurian John Vorster or the irascible P.W. Botha. (Botha recently beat up his ancient garden- er for some mild horticultural lapse; the gardener decided not to prefer charges against his equally ancient employer.) The world, following our mistaken instincts, has been expecting a bloodbath here. 'As South Africa slides into chaos 'So it's back to my place for a quick sniff of glue, a slap-up orgy and lashings and lashings of beer!' and bloodshed ... ' an American-accented voice intoned on my short-wave radio the other day; at the time I was looking out of my hotel window at the surfers riding the rollers and the holidaymakers squealing as they took the corners on the chairlift above the sea-front. Soon afterwards a foreign television correspondent announced huffily to a crowd of colleagues: 'I didn't come here to report an election, I came to report a civil war.' And in disgust he packed his bags for Bosnia.

No one believed the election could pass off without bloodshed of some kind, and the bombs and violence of the past few days have shown that the enrages have not gone away. But Buthelezi's Inkatha Free- dom Party joined the political process, thus preventing a savage civil war in Natal and the townships of the Rand; and General Constand Viljoen, a surprisingly thoughtful man who once led the South African army into Angola, has now led his far-Right Freedom Front into the polls too, isolating those white extremists who reach for their guns when they hear the words 'constitu- tional change'. As a result, the violent opposition now comes only from uncon- nected groups of implacables, not from anyone of the slightest political weight. That is important.

Last weekend I went to see the enrage of enrages, Eugene Terr'blanche, whose AWB movement was holding a rally in the small town of Brits, outside Johannesburg. It was a hallucinogenic vision of beer bellies and shaven heads, dark glasses and weaponry: Soldier of Fortune magazine made flesh. Terr'blanche, a one-time actor, gave an effective speech in his flowing Afrikaans. He compared the founders of apartheid to Julius Caesar, stabbed in the back by the very people who ought to have been the greatest supporters of division by race; he meant the National Party, of course. On the rugby ground at Brits the single stand, which could have taken 600 people, was only half full. There was applause, but no frenzy; and whereas my colleagues and I would normally have expected plenty of rough-housing and jostling, and perhaps a beating-up in a quiet corner, we were left alone.

Apathy seemed to have overcome the AWB's supporters; and when I spoke to Terr'blanche afterwards, even his denials that support had dropped away since his disastrous intervention in the attempted coup in Bophuthatswana seemed to be made for form's sake. Then his pale blue eyes lit up; he gripped my hand with his thick fingers, and I felt the stiff hairs that grew on their backs. 'Things will happen,' he said. 'You will see.' Well, we've started seeing already. But unless the wild men actually kill the leaders of the new South Africa, they cannot succeed in stopping what has begun here.

John Simpson is foreign affairs editor of the BBC.