United No More

"We aren't heading for a revolution in our country, we are already in the midst of one," says the stern, silver-haired churchman as he glances at the acacias and bougainvilleas blooming outside the window of his study. "And by that I mean it's a revolution of ideas, a revolution of our system of values. We are forced -- even if we don't like it -- we are simply forced to join hands and to share power. We can't go on any longer as we did for the past 300 years. We've got to change."

Those words would not be particularly surprising if they came from one of the liberal reformers who have long opposed apartheid, South Africa's poisonous system of racial segregation. But they come from Johan Heyns, the new leader of the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (N.G.K., the Dutch Reformed Church), for many years one of apartheid's principal pillars. The church has traditionally provided God-fearing Afrikaners with powerful scriptural support $ for the system by insisting that separation of the races represents the will of the Almighty.

As South African whites head toward their first general election in six years on May 6, Heyns' warning is clear proof that the fortress of apartheid, which looks so monolithic to the outside world, is showing signs of cracks. It is also an indication that the once united Afrikaners, die volk, the white tribe, who number only 3 million of the country's nearly 35 million* inhabitants but grimly assert their claim to political power, stand united no longer.

State President P.W. Botha's Nationalists are expected to win next week's election handily (a recent poll gives them 58%), but the violence and bloodshed that are leading up to that

election make the casting of white ballots almost an irrelevance in the crisis that is facing the country.

If the majority were allowed to vote, according to a poll by Johannesburg's largest black newspaper, the Sowetan, the winner by a substantial margin would be Nelson Mandela, an imprisoned leader of the outlawed African National Congress (A.N.C.) whose wife Winnie has become an international symbol of protest. Barred from the ballot, the blacks turned to another kind of action last week in one of the worst outbursts of violence since a state of emergency was declared last June.

The new bloodshed began when a hand grenade came sailing out of the back of a truck as it sped past a police parade ground in Soweto, the huge black township outside Johannesburg. The blast killed one black trainee and wounded 64 others. Six hours later, a bomb exploded under a parked car in the white suburb of Mayfair, shattering windows and starting a fire.

Much worse lay ahead. The center of conflict was the six-week-old strike by 18,000 railway workers. Officials of the government-run South African Transport Services suddenly announced that any striker who did not return to work on Wednesday would be fired. When the deadline arrived, only 2,000 workmen showed up at their jobs; the other 16,000 were told that the company had "terminated their contracts."

About 50 blacks armed with axes and sticks then began marching from the headquarters building of the Congress of South African Trade Unions to the nearby Doornfontein railroad station. Police tried to disperse them, then teargassed them. The marchers attacked the officers with knives, clubs and machetes, according to police. The police answered by opening fire, killing three protesters and wounding five more, and then followed a trail of blood back to the union headquarters and besieged the building. Finally the police broke in and arrested 400 people inside.

In another railroad clash, in Germiston east of Johannesburg, police killed three more union demonstrators. The police said they were attacked by workers wielding knives and throwing stones; union leaders insisted the police had stormed into the crowd with whips.

In Soweto, anonymous pamphlets called for a three-day general work stoppage to protest municipal police actions against rent-strikers. Thousands stayed home from jobs and school, some out of fear. Black militants stoned buses until all bus and taxi service between Soweto and Johannesburg temporarily shut down.

The violence was not limited to Johannesburg. In Umlazi, a black township outside the Indian Ocean port of Durban, riot police hunting suspected terrorists surrounded a house and ordered the occupants to leave the building. One man came out shooting, officials said, but police gunfire drove him back inside. Another man opened fire from a window and was shot dead. Police flung hand grenades into the house and set it afire. Inside the ruins they found two corpses and a cache of AK-47 assault rifles.

The government blamed all this violence on agents of the A.N.C. and publicly warned Zambia and other countries along South Africa's northern border to stop providing them with aid. On Saturday, South African commandos attacked the Zambian town of Livingstone, blowing up two buildings and killing five people who Pretoria claimed were A.N.C. guerrillas.

Violence has become commonplace in South Africa as more and more blacks have concluded that they have no other way to protest against the apartheid government. And although Botha at his campaign rallies cries defiance and declares he will never compromise on racial segregation in government, housing and education, many embattled Afrikaners know that change is inevitable. "People are really concerned about the choices they must make," says one senior campaign staffer. "Angst is an Afrikaner growth industry."

How do ordinary Afrikaners look at the difficult choices confronting them? Listen to some of them:

-- Frederik van Zyl, a successful building contractor: "I don't want blacks to take over South Africa, but I don't like the way that people treat the blacks either. I pay my boys well, and they like working for me. But hell, % man, I wouldn't want to live next door to them. Still, when I go to football matches at Rand Stadium, I realize how many of them there are and that we have to make a deal with them in order to survive."

-- Jan van Rensburg, a railroad worker who helps in a soup kitchen that provides 300 meals a day for the Afrikaner poor: "I haven't made up my mind. I am not happy with any party or any policy in South Africa. I don't agree completely with anything that is being offered. I can't change overnight."

-- George Walker, who quit his job as a bank executive to join a foundation working for an end to apartheid: "Change in this country has to come from us Afrikaners. And I want to be in on it."

-- A housewife living near Johannesburg who did not want her name used: "If the leaders tell us that blacks can live next door, what can I do? If they are clean and not noisy, I won't object. But I hope my children finish school before the blacks are allowed in."

-- Dawie Crous, a traffic policeman: "It's easy to hate blacks. I've seen enough crime and senseless stuff among black drivers on the roads to wonder what the hell would happen if these guys were the ones laying down the law. I have to be honest and say that I feel more comfortable with my own people, that means Afrikaner people. But we all know that changes will have to come. I can't say I feel threatened."

-- Johan de Villiers, who farms 5,000 acres along the Limpopo River: "We whites are always worried about our future and our children's future. We're always avaricious. We always want more and more. The African is different. If there is a drought, he moves on. He can adapt. If they can control their breeding and we can control our avarice, there is no reason we can't somehow get together. We do the planning, they do the work."

-- Hansie Willemse, a farmer near the Zimbabwe border: "I fought in Zimbabwe for 22 years. Yes, I fought. Now I'm sick of fighting. I think they are capable here of sorting something out around a table. That's what should have happened 50 years ago. I don't think it's too late."

It is difficult to draw firm conclusions from random interviews, but it is obvious that many Afrikaners regard the traditional apartheid as doomed. They anticipate significant changes and, though anxious and apprehensive, insist they are ready to cope with them. Whether they are really ready is another question.

Actually, even Afrikaner politicians have been proclaiming for some time that change is coming. It was in 1979 that Piet Koornhof, then Minister of Cooperation and Development, rather boldly announced to an audience in Washington, "Apartheid as you came to know it is dead." And none other than the crusty, old (now 71) Botha declared that the "aspirations of urban blacks and the fulfillment of them must form part of the strategy for the protection of everyone in South Africa."

Those pronouncements sounded like little more than empty rhetoric until, under great pressure from both the black majority and the outside world, Botha in that same year grudgingly drew up a list of what he called reforms. Some were of considerable significance, though they consisted mainly of canceling a few of the more obnoxious harassments sanctioned by the 200-odd apartheid laws. The law excluding blacks from official labor unions was rescinded in 1979 (about l million are now members). The law forbidding interracial marriage went in 1985. The hated passbooks, which sharply restricted a black's right to travel and find a new job, were abolished last year. Other, supposed reforms, such as the creation of two separate and powerless legislative chambers for South Africa's Asians and coloreds, were introduced but had little effect.

Botha's talk of reform pleased few. Black rioting, predictable under the law of rising expectations, became so widespread and bloody that he imposed a harsh state of emergency last June. An estimated 20,000, mostly blacks and many of them children, have been detained without trial since the beginning of the state of emergency; some 4,500 of them are still under arrest. But black leaders refuse even to negotiate with Botha unless he agrees to legalize the A.N.C. and begin negotiations on a new and democratic constitution. Some Afrikaners, on the other hand, reacted to all talk of reform as if it were the work of the devil. Sixteen Nationalist members of Parliament broke with Botha and formed the new Conservative Party, pledged to total apartheid, now and forever.

Central to the illusion of apartheid, as decreed by the major segregation laws of the 1950s, was the fantasy that South Africa's blacks could be legally assigned to ten autonomous tribal homelands and then admitted to white South Africa only as migrant workers, not citizens. The realities of urbanization mock that fantasy, and anyone wandering around Cape Town or Johannesburg today can see blacks sitting next to whites in restaurants or lining up in the same banking queue to be served by a black teller. Nobody is surprised to observe a black traffic policeman ticketing a white who ran a stop sign, or even a black-and-white couple holding hands as they wander into a video-rental store.

But venture out into the Afrikaners' rural platteland in the Transvaal or the Orange Free State, and apartheid looks alive and well. The Afrikaner driving his bakkie (pickup) rides alone in the front seat, while his black laborers squat in the back. Outside, some blacks sit eating bread and drinking milk they have bought from the nearby corner store, which has a counter for natives only. There is no obvious hostility here, just a sense that this is how things are, and always will be. As the Lord made them.

What traditionally united the Afrikaners was not just their language and their religion but also their history of struggle and oppression. They are very proud and very aware of their claim that they came to this land first. When Jan van Riebeeck disembarked at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 to establish a supply station for Dutch East India Company vessels en route to India, he found nobody except a few brown-skinned nomads whom the Dutch called Hottentots. Van Riebeeck described these aborigines as a "dull, rude, lazy and stinking nation," and most of them subsequently died in an epidemic of smallpox, brought on a company ship from India. To do the heavy work, the Dutch settlers, who were soon joined by a number of Germans and French Huguenot refugees, brought in slaves, mostly from Madagascar, Mozambique and the Dutch East Indies. Thus the primal relationship between the Afrikaners and the blacks took form.

The British arrived in 1795 and seized the Cape Town settlement with no real justification except that they wanted to deny the strategic site to France's India trade. But even after the defeat of Napoleon, the British stayed on. They subjected the pioneering Afrikaners to the discomforts of British law, including a ban on slavery.

In the 1830s the Afrikaners decided to escape English rule by setting forth on their Great Trek, which over the years has acquired the epic aura of a Long March or a Valley Forge. Packing their women and children into ox-drawn wagons, some 6,000 Afrikaners departed from the British settlements on the coast and tramped hundreds of miles to the northeast, to the uninhabited wilderness along the Vaal River.

It was only after they had established themselves there that they clashed ^ for the first time with fierce Bantu tribesmen moving southward in search of new lands. Border skirmishes lasted for decades, imbuing the Afrikaners with a permanent sense of being threatened, isolated and beleaguered.

In their isolation, the two landlocked Afrikaner republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State lost all contact with their Dutch origins. The Afrikaners had their own language now and their own lands. There was no thought of ever going home to Europe because there was no longer any home to go to. And the outside world ignored their struggles. The Enlightenment had passed them by, and so had the Industrial Revolution.

Then in 1867 somebody discovered a diamond near the Orange River. "Gentlemen," said the British Colonial Secretary as he inspected one of the earliest of these discoveries, "this is the rock on which the future success of South Africa will be built." Indeed, a quarter of a billion carats were to be dug out in the next century. Since the diamonds lay in Afrikaner lands, the British simply declared that they were annexing those lands, and British miners came pouring in. Two decades later rich deposits of gold were discovered in the Transvaal. Still more Britons and other foreigners came flooding in to dig up what had been the Voortrekkers' homeland.

The Afrikaners organized a fierce resistance to the British in the Boer (farmer) War (1899-1902). Outnumbered and outgunned, they took to the bush and engaged in guerrilla attacks (the word commando is one of their contributions to the English language). Britain's commander, Lord Horatio Kitchener, was no less fierce; he sent troops to burn down the Boer commandos' villages. Women and children were rounded up and confined in a new kind of establishment: concentration camps. Of the estimated 60,000 prisoners, some 26,000 women and children succumbed to famine and disease. When it was all over, the British reigned supreme over the sullen and resentful Afrikaners. Some Boer military leaders, notably Louis Botha (no relation to the current President) and Jan Christian Smuts, preached reconciliation with the British, and it was largely because of them that Britain united all its regional territories into the Union of South Africa in 1910. Botha and Smuts became the nation's first two Prime Ministers and led it into World War I on Britain's side.

But during this era of reconciliation there arose an underground movement that preached Afrikaner solidarity and resistance to both British and blacks. Its driving force was the Broederbond (the Brotherhood), a secret society founded in 1918 to get better jobs for Afrikaners, many of them victims of economic hard times, and to promote the use of Afrikaans, a hybrid variant of Dutch that became a written language only in the middle of the 19th century. Today, though not listed in any telephone book, the Broederbond has 12,000 members in more than 800 cells, including President Botha (Member 4,487) and most other Afrikaner leaders of both church and state.

One of the Broederbond's most zealous racists, Daniel Malan, founded the present-day National Party in 1934 and finally achieved the Afrikaners' revenge in the election of 1948. He defeated Smuts and the British influence under a new slogan: apartheid. It was not really new, of course. The South Africa Act of 1909, passed by the British Parliament, had barred blacks from sitting in the legislature. The Natives Land Acts of 1913 had established a few black "reserves" and claimed the remaining 85% of the nation for whites. Interracial sex was proscribed as far back as 1902.

But these were fairly primitive efforts in asserting white power. The apartheid of Malan's Afrikaner Nationalists represented an all encompassing ideology, a vision of how life should be organized. One of their first measures, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, did just what it promised. But exactly who belonged to which race? The Population Registration Act of 1950 provided elaborate definitions and regulations, and even now about 1,000 people every year apply to get reclassified from one race to another. That same year the Group Areas Act empowered the government to uproot thousands of people and move them elsewhere. In Cape Town's District Six, for example, some 70,000 coloreds were removed from their bustling and vibrant neighborhood and shipped to a housing project outside town so that their old homes could be razed and replaced with white businesses and high-rises. Many whites boycotted this scheme, however, and the razed area remains a series of vacant lots.

By 1965 apartheid had become so obsessively established that a white taxi driver refused to let a blind white girl and her colored nurse ride together in his cab; that white and colored children were forbidden to appear together in a Red Cross pageant; that Cabinet ministers refused to attend any receptions where blacks or coloreds might be present; that the Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach was denied permission to bring his Vietnamese wife into the country to meet his parents; that a black workman could hold two wires for a white electrician but was not allowed to join them together.

Presiding over this state of folly was one of Malan's most dogmatic successors, Hendrik Verwoerd. In a radio broadcast, Verwoerd declared, "The policy of separate development ((apartheid)) is designed for happiness, security and stability . . . for the Bantu as well as the whites." Said Andries Treurnicht, onetime chairman of the Broederbond and subsequently founder of the breakaway Conservative Party: "We believe that justice is best attained by way of differentiation or separate development."

This cruel form of happiness and justice has, of course, inspired a worldwide campaign against South Africa. After years of prodding by protest groups, the U.S. Congress in 1986 banned new corporate investment in South Africa and stopped the import of South African steel, iron, coal, uranium and textiles, as well as the export of computers and petroleum to that country. Similar punishments have been imposed by the European Community, the Commonwealth and Japan.

In response to all this, the pugnacious Botha could and did invoke the Afrikaner traditions of solidarity and defiance against what he has called "cynical and sanctimonious antagonists abroad." But what has turned many Afrikaners against the segregationist ideology is that it simply does not work very well in an industrialized modern society. The white-run economy needs blacks, and it needs them in the same buildings with whites, working side by side. Botha is an autocrat, not someone who enjoys bowing to pressure, but even he admits that he dislikes and avoids the word apartheid. He prefers "cooperative coexistence."

It was in this grudging spirit that Botha proposed his "reforms" -- whose chief effect was, not surprisingly, to whet the appetite for more. It was in this spirit that he called for new elections, thinking that he could crush his critics on the right by campaigning on a platform of xenophobia. But Botha soon found himself confronting an unprecedented wave of criticism from the "left," which is left only in relation to Afrikaner traditionalism. This criticism came from three important directions:

The intelligentsia. Because it is an ideology as well as a power system, apartheid needs the Afrikaner intelligentsia to explain and justify its workings. The intellectual center of Afrikanerdom is the University of Stellenbosch, just outside Cape Town, and Stellenbosch is in turmoil. Not only are the students increasingly disaffected (see box), but 27 senior academics recently resigned in protest from the National Party and issued a manifesto demanding abolition of all "residuals of apartheid." When the Cape Town Nationalist newspaper Die Burger dismissed the gesture as "trivial" because there were only 27 protesters in a faculty of more than 700, an additional 301 promptly signed the manifesto and promised that more would soon add their signatures.

"The government is the captive of its own meaningless rhetoric," observes Stellenbosch Economics Professor Sampie Terreblanche, a leading National Party adviser, member of the Broederbond and, until he was fired last month for joining the 27, vice chairman of the South African Broadcasting Corp. "The government is never prepared to admit mistakes. It will not dismantle apartheid. The National Party is an Afrikaner party, and it intends to keep power not just in white hands but in Afrikaner hands. It was never in favor of real reform. That was just cosmetic, to prolong Afrikaner control."

"Petty politics and stereotyped slogans no longer please anyone," wrote another of the 27 signers, Philosophy Professor Willie Esterhuyse, in the Sunday Times of Johannesburg. He claimed to be speaking not just for a few professors but also for a growing number of professional people, doctors, businessmen, the young. "People are not only yearning for new ideas. They also want a new political style, a rhetoric which is conciliatory. Unhappiness with the National Party and its leadership does not simply concern the pace of reform. It is concerned with the nature, goals and strategies of reform itself."

Novelist Andre Brink (Knowledge of the Night), some of whose work has been banned in South Africa, agrees: "If faced with the ultimate choice between sharing and going under, the Masada complex need not prevail. There is still a chance -- small and diminishing rapidly -- of entering into the kind of dialectic with the present which may open up the future." Frederik van Zyl Slabbert was leader of the official opposition, the Progressive Federal Party, until he resigned in disgust last year, so his criticisms are hardly new. But he is also a former professor of sociology and thus well tuned to the new mood of intellectual disaffection. He blames Botha for much of the discontent. "He is an authoritarian President, uncomfortable with questions or discussion. In the past, the National Party was consulted; now Botha tells it what to do. This has emasculated the Parliament. The party faithful feel that they have lost control over their destiny."

Of the onetime farmers who still proudly celebrate the anniversary of the Great Trek, Slabbert says, "Afrikaners are now bourgeois, upper middle class, the Babbitts of Bloemfontein. They are beginning to feel ashamed of their racism. The tribal bonds are weakening. Afrikaner hegemony and solidarity are crumbling."

The church. South Africa is officially a Christian state, and most Afrikaners take their Calvinist religion seriously. In the upcountry towns where Afrikanerdom still follows the old rules, Sunday is strictly a day for prayer and rest and for paternal readings from the leather-bound family Bible: no sports, no fishing, no television.

The Dutch Reformed Church came with the original settlers in 1652, and although it allowed the first black slaves to worship together with their masters, it decreed in 1857 that blacks and whites must attend separate services. Because of its insistence that apartheid is the will of God, the N.G.K. has sometimes been referred to as the "National Party at prayer."

The earliest faint stirrings of dissent occurred in 1974, when that year's synod departed from the traditional affirmation that apartheid derived directly from Scripture, and said only that apartheid was not in any way contrary to Scripture. That dissent grew stronger in 1980, when eight theologians published a statement protesting the "apparent inability of the institutionalized church in South Africa to fulfill its God-given calling of reconciliation . . . between different race groups." In 1982 the eight grew to 123 ministers calling on the N.G.K. to play a "much greater role of reconciliation," and though that year's synod elected an eminent conservative as moderator, it decided that the church's racial policy should be "completely revised in the light of Scripture."

When that revision came up for a decision last October, the synod completely reversed the church's traditional stand. "The Dutch Reformed Church is convinced that the application of apartheid as a political and social system which injures people and unjustly benefits one group above & another cannot be accepted on Christian ethical grounds since it conflicts with the principle of neighborly love and righteousness." The church declared its doors open to all races, and it elected the liberal Heyns as its moderator. This does not mean that the church has become or is about to become fully integrated (or even partially integrated). In the gold-mining town of Germiston, the Rev. Pieter Dumas admits that some of his white parishioners have dropped out since a colored man was elected an elder for the first time. In Pretoria some 3,000 people are talking of starting a new church for whites only.

But Heyns believes that the church's new course is the only one possible. "We have been for 300 years in this country in a certain position of strength and of being able to dictate things," says he. "Now I would say that very, very suddenly in a nation's history we aren't the guardians anymore. We are partners. And how to act as a responsible partner, that's the challenge."

The political dissenters. One of the most closely watched races in next week's election pits Denis Worrall, who resigned as Ambassador to London to challenge his former leaders, against Chris Heunis, the Minister of Constitutional Development, who is charged with devising "reforms" that will somehow make the remaining elements of apartheid more palatable. "Different groups and people exist as communities," argues Heunis. "The Group Areas Act ((which segregates residential areas)) makes it possible for them to live as communities."

Worrall emphatically rejects such reasoning. "All remnants of apartheid must be abolished," says he. "The government is misreading the public's readiness for fundamental change. The country yearns for a shared vision of the future, but the government's reform program has shut down. White South Africans of all parties are tired of the government not facing its task. Only the abolition of apartheid will create the environment for negotiations."

Despite Worrall's optimism, recent polls show him trailing Heunis by 10 percentage points. But they also show that many agree with his argument. A survey in six key urban constituencies reported that 44% of the voters questioned believed the government had not kept its promises of reform, 43.4% thought the Nationalists had been in power too long and a surprising 51.2% favored scrapping the Group Areas Act.

Others are joining the fray. The most notable is Wynand Malan (no relation & to the founder of apartheid), who announced that he was resigning from the Nationalists to campaign for his own seat as an independent. "The National Party finds itself in a stage where it is losing its ideology and yet is unable to replace it with a policy," said Malan. "I did not clash with the National Party, I clashed with my conscience. And in the end, conscience wins."

Another rebel is Esther Lategan, a social worker and businesswoman who resigned from the Nationalists to campaign as an independent. "People live in fear of the future," she says. "You must give them hope, and that is what I am talking about. How long can we stay in control? What about our children? Apartheid must go."

Such open splits are still rare, but the new Afrikaner discontent is having its effect even on politicians loyal to Botha. Foreign Minister Roelof ("Pik") Botha (no relation to the President) told an election rally this month that some of the social restrictions of apartheid are absurd. "I cannot understand," he said, "how you can stand in a lift with a black man with a toolbox in his hand, but when he puts on a suit you want nothing to do with him."

Even the shadowy Broederbond, whose whole purpose is to work for Afrikaner power, is beginning to make strange noises. First it forced out about 1,000 members who had split with the Nationalists to form the ultraright Herstigte (Reconstituted) National Party. Then, last year, it began circulating among its members a "working document" that canvassed opinion on the idea of a multiracial government. "The rights of all groups should be advanced and fulfilled," it said. Now Broederbond Chairman Jan Pieter de Lange is speaking openly of a "tremendous need for more contact ((between races)) to build up mutual understanding."

Attacked from both left and right, Botha is campaigning as a "moderate" with a ferocity that only Afrikaners could consider moderate. Choosing the U.S. as his favorite target, Botha at an election rally in Lichtenburg in the Transvaal declared that the congressional sanctions against South Africa meant the Kremlin "had its work done for it in Washington." Waving his arms, Botha insisted, "South Africa is the scapegoat of America's bad conscience, ((but)) the South African government is not prepared to surrender." Some 2,000 Afrikaners leaped to their feet, applauding wildly. Carrying his campaign to restive Stellenbosch last week, Botha claimed that "reform, change and ( renewal" run "like a golden thread" through the history of the National Party. Those who thought otherwise, he declared, "should be ashamed of themselves." Student hecklers in the back howled and jeered at Botha, and one of them asked when he would retire. "If I feel like I do tonight, you're likely to see a good deal more of me in the future," he said.

Five parties are competing for 166 parliamentary seats in the May 6 election. To the right of the ruling Nationalists are the Conservatives and the even more reactionary Herstigte National Party, to the left the New Republic Party and the Progressives. The extreme right Afrikaanse Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), an all-white neofascist movement led by Eugene Terre Blanche that advocates total racial separation, will not field candidates in the election. "If the Nationalist government comes back into power," predicted an antigovernment campaigner at a multiracial Cape Town rally this month, "we will take this as a signal that you have rejected our path of peaceful protest." He warned of violence "on a scale never seen before."

Botha's Nationalists now hold a commanding 126 seats, and all pollsters and experts predict they will retain their majority. But Botha is aged, and the struggle to succeed him is expected to start soon after the election. Professor Sampie Terreblanche estimates that the "enlightened" wing of the party amounts to about 30% and the reactionary right wing to another 30%, with the remaining 40% spread out between. The winner must face new elections in 1989, and that clash may generate major changes, new alignments, even a new party.

Still very much in question, of course, is whether the impending changes will be enough at least to buy some time for further changes. And the demand of the black majority's leaders, both in and out of prison, is not just change but a change to black power. An election without blacks, one Soweto leader said last week, is "obscene." Botha and the Afrikaners retain full control of the instruments of power: almost all the officers of the well-equipped police force are Afrikaners, and the army is unquestionably the best on the continent. But facing the angry defiance of the black majority, backed by the economic and moral opposition of the outside world, the embattled Afrikaners seem at last to be losing their oft proclaimed determination to maintain apartheid at all costs. Botha's forces may win a majority of the white votes in next week's election, but history promises the eventual victory to the blacks.

FOOTNOTE: *Blacks number 26 million, mixed-race coloreds 3 million, English- speaking whites 1.5 million, Indians and other Asians 1 million.