Nelson Mandela, freed.

LIVING, as we do, in the age of information overload, we know everything about South Africa except what it is like. When I visited the country for the first time, I was of course interested in it as a political journalist. But a more deep-seated, if less serious," interest stemmed from reading Twenties and Thirties novels. I had been intrigued by the way the British of that period reacted to southern Africa-rather as the New Englanders of a century earlier had reacted to the American Southwest. There was the appeal of the exotic but spare landscape, the wide open spaces and fresh opportunities.

In the event, Johannesburg, where I entered the country, is so like my native Los Angeles that it brought tears to my eyes. I return home often enough that I don't normally need to feel nostalgia for L.A.; but eight thousand miles away, the same mixture of bougainvillea, hibiscus, oleander, and muffler shops made a powerful impression.

Those muffler shops, in fact, struck me as a minor symbol of South Africa's place in the world at large. That country is the only part of the African continent, I am told by people who have traveled more widely there, where an American could feel so much at home. And this may be partly why alienated liberals hate it so much more than they do other repressive societies.

For repressive it has been. Having read many accounts over the years, I was astounded by how little segregation and how much public equality, in certain respects, there now is: astounded that blacks and whites could eat together in restaurants without attracting attention, that blacks could be served by whites, that blacks and whites could work literally shoulder to shoulder (as in a Cape Town hotel where, one morning, a blonde woman and a black man stood on tiptoe together hanging a sign over a breakfast buffet). Compared to even ten years ago, this was significant change.

But then there was the hotel doorman in Johannesburg, with whom I had been exchanging casual chitchat for a week, who one day came over to talk politics, and to wonder (reasonably enough, I thought) how people could trust their children to the care of a woman whose legal existence they rated near zero. Or the black editor who told me of an encounter he had had that day: two of his staff-one Afrikaner, one imported English-had burst into his office wanting him to settle some dispute. "'Get out of my office, both of you,"' he had said-"I have just twenty minutes to finish this leading article.' And"-he reported to me with some amazement-"here am I, a black man, telling two white professionals to get out of my office-and they went." Or the simple reaction of one black to some unpleasantness: "It hurts my heart."

This must to put to rights-on that point there is now wide (though not universal) agreement among Afrikaners. And while there have certainly been other factors influencing the tempo of events in South Africa, at bottom the system of apartheid was bound to change as soon as influential Afrikaners came to feel that it was no longer tenable. For some, it became morally untenable. One man-a representative of the South African government-told me that for him the epiphany came, appropriately, in church. If we are all God's children, he reasoned one day, then we are all brothers-and how can we treat our brothers as we have been doing? For others, the point was economic: if the country's potential was to be realized, blacks' brains as well as their hands had to be put to use. (Although one should add-pace the South African Conservative Party, which considers the businessmen who make this point to be selling out to short-sighted self-interest-that admitting that blacks' brains are worth using is already a moral statement.)

But if apartheid is doomed-and indeed it has been crumbling for a number of years, with P. W. Botha at the height of his power starting to modify first one law and then another-what will come after it? South Africans want to hope. The formulation I heard with incantatory frequency, from members of all races, was: "There is an enormous reservoir of goodwill in this country." But one would have been hard pressed to tap that reservoir in the days following Nelson Mandela's release. The television footage of surging, challengingly triumphant black crowds; the clashes between looters and police in Cape Town (normally a city with good race relations); the escalation of warfare between the United Democratic Front and Inkatha in Natal-none of this spoke of the hoped-for goodwill.

WHEN I WAS in South Africa a year and a half ago, racial harmony was in flower. Politeness reigned in the cities; in the countryside, black passersby smiled and waved at a lone white woman driving along. To be sure, there had been violent incidents just two years before; and two black businessmen I interviewed seemed to delight in using the cover of a foreign visitor to take digs at my Afrikaner guide. I thought of them as I watched those televised crowds. Can the politeness survive? And should it?

I believe so. Although my heart went out to people like the hotel doorman and the newspaper editor, or an Indian banker who explained why he wasn't going to give up on South Africa and follow his brother to Toronto, or the porter in a country inn who was flabbergasted by a tip his French or Italian counterpart would have politely taken for granted-I still could not, as a white American, manage to feel superior to the Afrikaners I met. Their ancestors came to that country three hundred years ago, as did the first of ours to America; fought with and pushed back the indigenous populations (our Indian tribes, their Hottentots and Bushmen); and met and defeated, but did not extirpate, competing colonists who had come in from another direction (our Spanish/Mexicans, their Zulus and Xhosas). We wound up a majority, they a minority. How differently might our polities have arranged themselves had it been the other way around?

As it turned out, they have built the only stable society in all of subSaharan Africa. In recent decades, although blacks' efforts on their own behalf were certainly important, the real struggle was between those whites who wanted to keep the benefits of that society for themselves, and those who wanted to share. In the coming years, although the whites will not sit quietly as others decide their fate, the real struggle is likely to be between blacks who want to preserve what is good in that society while eliminating its basic injustice, and those who find it so fundamentally flawed that it must be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Indaba movement (indaba is Zulu for meeting") represents the first of those impulses; the radical PanAfricanist Congress the second. Where will Mandela-who faces the task of transforming himself back from an icon into a political leader-fit into this picture?

An answer emerges from viewing him alongside Buthelezi. Mandela, son of a chief of the Tembu tribe (allied with the Xhosas), fled s home in his early twenties and went to Johannesburg to be a policeman rather than submit to an arranged tribal marriage. Buthelezi, great-grandson of King Cetewayo, is the political leader of the Zulus, the largest and most storied tribe in South Africa, and traditional enemy of the Xhosas. While the Zulus have been as ill-treated as other blacks in their dealings with white South Africa, they have strong traditions, an attachment to the land-things, in other words, that they feel worth conserving. Buthelezi's vision is of a society composed of a number of different tribes and ethnic groups, peaceably coexisting in a federal system with constitutional protections for each group. Mandela's vision is of a "non-racial" country in which tribes would cease to have any importance. (I think he'd rather die than don a leopard skin, as Buthelezi does for tribal ceremonies.) Hence the clashes in Natal between Buthelezi's Inkatha (the Zulu political organization-distinet from Indaba, which by definition welcomes members of all races) and the United Democratic Front (largely Zulu, but allied with Mandela's African National Congress) are battles over the very idea of tribalism.

This partly accounts for the odd treatment in the Western press of the two sides, in which Inkatha is referred to as a Zulu organization, and the UDF as a "broad-based anti-apartheid movement." It also helps to explain how the UDF can justify its a outrance bloodthirstiness toward other blacks, featuring the infamous neeklacings: since the ANC-UDF combine has designated itself the representative of all blacks in South Africa, black groups that fail to back it are necessarily lackeys of apartheid.

Against this background of enmity, it is a measure of Mandela's personal stature, and the symbolic importance he had taken on during his imprisonment, that at one point a year or so ago Buthelezi refused the invitation of then-president Botha to participate in election reform, saying that no meaningful reform could be discussed until Mandela was released.

Saint Nelson

MANDELA in the last few weeks has been received resoundingly the world press. While there has been a good deal of serious, level-headed reporting and analysis, there have also been headlines such as "Mandela: Free of Bitterness," "Mandela Faces Test as Peacemaker," and, ascending sharply on the hagiographical scale, "Mandela: The Man and His Myth-years Out of Public View Have Given Prisoner Aura of a Messiah." In his speech in Cape Town upon his release, he described F. W. de Klerk as "a man of integrity." In his first press conference the next day, he was gracious toward the National Party ministers who had visited him in prison, and he spoke movingly of the kindness of his jail wardens: "That has wiped out any bitterness which a man could have." In a speech in Natal two weeks later, he urged his followers and their opponents to throw down their weapons and cease their bloodshed. In interviews

he has said things like, We must clearly demonstrate our goodwill to our white compatriots and convince them by our conduct and arguments that a South Africa without apartheid will be a better home for all."

But these words of reconciliation have alternated with very different signals. He speaks of peace, but the clenched fist goes up in salute. Although he describes himself as a Marxist but not a Communist, he gives unreserved praise to the South African Communist Party, and identifies himself as a "loyal and disciplined member" of the African National Congress, whose public policy statements have used language strikingly similar to that of Brezhnev-era Soviet Communism, including calls for "people's democracy." (In this regard it's worth noting that Umkonto we Sizwe-the Spear of the Nation-commonly referred to as "the military arm of the ANC," is actually a joint project of the ANC and the South African Communist Party.) Mandela speaks about the need to reassure "the whites [who] are our fellow citizens," but then adduces the necessity to nationalize certain industries, especially banking and mining, and to "redistribute" the wealth. He wishes to negotiate with the government, but only if the ANC is placed on "an equal footing" with the National Party-neatly cutting out Inkatha (not to mention the Coloreds and Asians) from consideration. And with breathtaking disregard for a segment of South Africa's white population that has produced many opponents of apartheid (most notably Helen Suzman), he embraced both Yasir Arafat and his principles, and said that if "the truth hurts" South Africa's Jews, "it is too bad."

For years, FREE NELSON MANDELA has been the battlecry worldwide of people who could not reliably have found South Africa on a map. Nelson Mandela, freed, is much bigger than any of the slogans of the Left, but may find himself entrapped by them.