SOUTH AFRICA DISCOVERS IT'S A MULTICULTURAL TOURIST DRAW.

Byline: Donald G. McNeil Jr. The New York Times

The amahewu runs cooly, if a bit lumpily, down the throat. The mixture of grits, sugar and cold water tastes every bit as good as it sounds.

``There was utshwala - Zulu beer,'' the host, Hlonphisa Chonco, said apologetically. ``But a chicken fell in.''

In some ways, living with a Zulu family in Lesedi for a couple of days is like doing the same with an Amish family in the Pennsylvania Dutch country. There is plenty to eat, religion is an integral part of family life, and some modern conveniences are missing. In other ways, it's very different. For instance, the Amish never present a visitor with a leopard skin headband and insist that he join the war dance.

Lesedi is at the leading edge of a new South African trend - cultural tourism. The industry here is awakening to the fact that foreigners find Africa fascinating. Tourism is up 150 percent this year over last, and a few visitors are getting away from the Cape Town/game park circuit to take tours of Soweto, visit the Shakaland theme park or come here to move in with a real Xhosa, Basotho, Pedi or Zulu family.

The Lesedi village is only 45 minutes from Johannesburg, in the dry Magaliesberg Mountains. It has a conference room and will do fireside dinners with dancing for tour groups, but what makes it unusual is the variety of cultures on display in one place and the 32 overnight guests it can accommodate, at $110 a night with meals. A maximum of eight can join each family, sleeping in the four huts in each compound that are modified for visitors. The roofs are thatch and the floors are polished cow dung (no, it doesn't smell), but there are electric lights and heaters and a smaller hut behind each with a tile bathroom as comfortable as any fine hotel's.

The extended family of Silwanyephi Mvelase lives in 10 other huts, all of them surrounding the fire circle and cattle pen that form the core of any Zulu homestead. The whole is encircled by a stockade of twisted branches that are not proof against the chickens, dogs and goats that wander Lesedi. There is a persistent rooster problem - the strutting alarm clocks cannot tell the difference between a rising sun and a full moon. ``Like home, yes?'' smiled a well-rested Mvelase to a visitor who had not slept since 2:30 a.m. and was inquiring about borrowing a spear.

The village has been open less than a year, and there is no waiting list yet. A recent Saturday night found only one American family and two Mexican Foreign Ministry officials sleeping over. Day visitors included six Germans and a tour group from New York.

``Most of our visitors are from overseas,'' said Ntate Malatji, head of the Pedi family here. ``White South Africans are not so interested.''

While here, the families wear traditional clothes - fur loincloths for Zulu men, wool blankets and straw hats for Basotho, white cotton wraps and turbans for Xhosa. Malatji wears a kilt. It is one of the seeming incongruities of African life that, with the short history lessons that Lesedi specializes in, begins to make sense.

The Pedis were forced to submit to British rule in 1879, Malatji said, when they lost the Battle of Tsate to a red-coated force, half of which wore skirts. The 4,000 Pedi warriors thought it shameful to shoot at ladies and realized too late that they were being charged by a regiment of Highlanders. To honor them, many Pedis today wear kilts - and those who don't own one sometimes dance in their wives' dresses.

Lesedi's chief teacher is Reggie Dlamini, head of the Xhosa family, who works a long day. Most of the 30 Africans in the four villages speak only broken English.

At the fireside, Dlamini told the story of Shaka, the Genghis Khan of the Zulus, from his illegitimate birth in a minor clan to his leadership of armies that swept southern Africa in the early 19th century. The next day, in a clearing in the woods, he narrated an hourlong pantomime of a typical rural courtship that begins with a herd boy admiring a girl fetching water. Dlamini described the subtle investigations by the girl's sisters into the boy's character and the negotiations over how many cows the boy's family must pay for her. A devoted father, he explained, seeks more than the usual 11 cows for a common man's daughter or 20 for a chief's. (In Africa, the groom pays the dowry.)

The wedding celebration ends with a ritual stick battle begun by the boys of the bride's village against the groom's, the message being: ``Mistreat our sister and we'll come back and do this for real.''

Lesedi's four families were chosen after word of mouth spread among the laborers who built the complex. ``It fell in my ears that they were having this place and I came for an interview,'' said Malatji of the Pedi compound. He brought with him assorted relatives, including one of his three wives; the other two remain with his 10 children in the northern Transvaal.

Dlamini has some show-biz experience: He was in a dance troupe that once toured California and Las Vegas. And Chonco, from the Zulu family, sometimes dances and sings with Johnny Clegg, a white South African with a Zulu rock and roll band. Like many black South Africans, he has both urban and rural roots - on his days off, he may make the four-hour trip back to KwaZulu/Natal or catch a bus to Soweto, Johannesburg's black township, where he has cousins.

If Lesedi is a place where whites can get a sense of rural Africa, it is also a place where Africans can celebrate their cultures, which have been heavily diluted by Western and urban ways. One of the dances that Dlamini leads each evening expresses the fear that a newcomer from the cold mountains of Lesotho feels in Johannesburg. ``I'm afraid to wear my blanket in Soweto,'' the song goes. Those city slickers in the township, he frets, laugh at rubes.

It's not about blankets, Dlamini tells the multiracial crowd. ``It's about being proud to be what you are. Only when we do that can we understand each other.''