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                                                                                WORLD, Page 38

SOUTH AFRICA

Extremes in Black and White


While the country moves toward a multiracial society, militants
on both sides say they will never accept each other -- and are
getting ready to fight

By SCOTT MACLEOD/JOHANNESBURG


    Negotiations to write a new constitution for South Africa
have been under way since December, but sometimes it seems as
if the extremes -- white and black -- might first pull the
country apart. The growing strength of the pro-apartheid
Conservative Party has forced President F.W. de Klerk to hold
a whites-only referendum on March 17 to shore up support for
multiracial democracy. Meanwhile, black ultranationalists are
demanding nothing less than De Klerk's surrender of power. With
the old order crumbling and the shape of the new uncertain, the
country is riper than ever for the destructive influence of
militants. Here are encounters with two of them.

    Ga Rankuwa Township, 8 a.m. Thami Mcerwa, 27, president of
the Azanian Youth Organization (AZAYO) -- Azania is what his
movement would rename South Africa -- is preparing for another
day's work in "the struggle." He spent the night as he usually
does: in a four-room matchbox house in Soweto that he shares
with his mother, brother and two sisters. Then he made the
50-mile journey north in his battered green Toyota to this black
ghetto outside Pretoria.

    Today his task is to deliver a eulogy for a fallen
comrade. Before entering the scruffy cemetery on the edge of the
township, Mcerwa takes off his T shirt, emblazoned with a
picture of a guerrilla fighter triumphantly holding up an AK-47
rifle, and pulls on a dashiki, a loose-fitting African tunic.
"Power!" he shouts to the 100 assembled mourners. "One Azania!
One nation!" As a hot morning sun beats down, he angrily accuses
a white-owned chemical company of murdering his comrade by
exposing him to dangerous toxins on the job. "They think black
life is so cheap!" he yells.

    Pretoria, 4 p.m. Piet Rudolph, 54, a grim, potbellied
former policeman wearing a khaki uniform with swastika-like
emblems, slips into an empty basement restaurant. Run by a
trusted friend, it is one of the places where he can hide if the
police are looking for him. He prefers to stay in the shadows
with the lights off as he settles into a corner table.

    Although Rudolph is the press officer for the neo-Nazi
Afrikaner Resistance Movement, known as the A.W.B., his job
mainly involves covert preparations for what he sees as the
coming war to defend the white "fatherland" against blacks.
Rudolph, in fact, is regarded as the country's most dangerous
white terrorist. Though many continue to scoff at the A.W.B. as
a comic-opera fringe group, that will change, Rudolph warns,
when chaos descends upon South Africa.

    Mcerwa's hero is Steve Biko, the black nationalist leader
whose 1977 death in police custody turned him into the country's
most celebrated black martyr. At 12 Mcerwa joined the 1976
Soweto uprising, the landmark outbreak of racial violence in
which more than 100 blacks were killed. As he ran home after
being teargassed, an older student who had been his political
mentor was gunned down by the police.

    Haunted by such bitter memories, Mcerwa rejects the
conciliatory approach of Nelson Mandela's African National
Congress. "We want total liberation, not cosmetic changes," he
explains. "It may take some bloodshed. We may go into a
civil-war struggle. But quick-fix solutions won't work. As Steve
Biko said, `It is better to die for an idea that will live than
to live for an idea that will die.' "

    Mcerwa has already come close to dying. In a fight with
A.N.C. members two years ago, his head was slashed open with a
panga. In another incident, an unknown assailant shot him in the
chest. But these brushes with death have not softened his
militancy a bit. He does not accept the A.N.C.'s decision to
suspend military attacks and ease sanctions. "The highest form
of negotiation," he says, "is armed struggle."

    Whites, he contends, are oppressors with little role to
play in the new South Africa. Afrikaners would have to accept
minority status, and are barred from joining the Azanian
organization. "Whites are part of the problem," he says. "They
can't be part of the solution."

    Although Mcerwa's movement is relatively small and
ineffective, at times there is more to it than cliches and
slogans. The young radical grabbed headlines in January when he
led a campaign against pop star Paul Simon for violating AZAYO's
cultural boycott; during the singer's tour in South Africa,
Mcerwa was arrested for the seventh time in 10 years after a
hand-grenade explosion damaged the Johannesburg offices of a
music company providing Simon with technical assistance. The
police released Mcerwa seven days later pending further
inquiries.

    As Rudolph sees it, the 3 million-strong Afrikaner volk
inherited a glorious national legacy. "I received it as I
received my mother's milk," he says. "I am a son of Africa. The
graves of my people are here, and this is where my cradle
stood."

    Together with leader Eugene Terre Blanche, Rudolph founded
the A.W.B. in 1973. The most important of its objectives, he
maintains, is the re-establishment of an Afrikaner nation in the
Transvaal and Orange Free State provinces. Either large
townships like Soweto would be partitioned out of the white
state, or else blacks would simply have to accept white
domination without complaint.

    The A.W.B.'s pursuit of that goal has earned it a deserved
reputation for being not only the most aggressively racist of
all the right-wing groups but also the most violent. At the root
of its militancy is what it terms the swart gevaar, or black
threat, combined with a conviction that reforms during the past
decade have amounted to a gradual capitulation to
communist-inspired black domination.

    Rudolph considers De Klerk a traitor for freeing and
negotiating with Mandela. Last August A.W.B. storm troopers
confronted police outside a hall where the President was
speaking; in the ensuing clash, two A.W.B. men and a black
bystander were killed. Rudolph and other leaders were arrested
and will stand trial this month.

    The "Battle of Ventersdorp," as Rudolph proudly calls it,
was not his first run-in with the white authorities. In 1990 he
broke into air-force headquarters in Pretoria and stole a large
cache of weapons. With the police on his tail, he disappeared
underground for six months and tried to organize commando
cells. To spark a Boer revolt, he went on a bombing spree,
targeting the offices of two senior De Klerk aides and Melrose
House, the historic site of the 1902 Afrikaner surrender in the
Anglo-Boer War.

    It is no coincidence that Rudolph's exploits parallel
those of his defiant forebears. Piet was named for a relative
who commanded the cannons in the 1838 battle of Blood River,
when the Boers defeated the Zulus and won control of
considerable territory. As a boy, Rudolph spent hours listening
to tales told by an old soldier who had been blinded by wounds
received in the turn-of-the-century Anglo-Boer conflict.

    In Rudolph's mind, though, the proud memories are
overwhelmed by enduring resentments. He vividly remembers how
Afrikaners were persecuted by the richer, more powerful British.
He felt the sting growing up on the gold reef east of
Johannesburg, the son of a poor white miner who believed he was
exploited by English capitalists. Even after Afrikaners won
absolute power in 1948, Rudolph continued to feel inferior. Upon
being taunted for his poor grammar as a young policeman, he
recalls, "I decided it was the last time I would be treated this
way by an English-speaker."

    After several years in the security branch, Rudolph left
the police in 1967 to pursue political office. As a candidate
for the ultra-right Reconstituted National Party, he lost four
parliamentary elections. "It was impossible to get the support
of South Africa for the Boer republic," he says. "The only way
was an unconstitutional struggle."

    Mcerwa ponders the question, What will he do if the
current negotiations lead to the formation of an interim
government that includes Mandela? The A.N.C., he replies, has
been co-opted by De Klerk. It has betrayed the people. "If the
masses believe this government is undemocratic, we will resist,"
he says.

    By now, Mcerwa has arrived back in Soweto for another
organizational meeting. At a small dwelling that doubles as a
comrade's home and an AZAYO branch office, he runs into Khosto
Seathlolo, a leader of the 1970s' student protests who was
sidelined by a long prison sentence. "He is one of our famous
activists," Mcerwa explains. "No, Thami," Seathlolo replies.
"You young guys are going to be the heroes."

    As Afrikaner civil servants stream out of Pretoria heading
for their middle-class suburbs, Rudolph is eager to make a
move. It may not be much longer, he speculates, before South
Africa descends into civil war. If De Klerk hands over power to
the A.N.C., he predicts, the volk will fight. If the
pro-apartheid Conservative Party defeats De Klerk in his reform
referendum, then it will be the blacks who rise up. Either way,
the Boers stand to lose whatever powers and privileges they
enjoyed during the apartheid years. "Time has run out in our
land," Rudolph says. "Now this cannot be resolved without a
fight." With that, he slips out the back exit, off to another
meeting to plan the African-Boer war.