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This new black consciousness has found an editorial voice in several magazines. The best is Tribute, a glossy full-color monthly that profiles successful blacks and plays to their growing taste for the good life. It features splashy articles about fashion and travel interspersed with ads touting expensive perfumes and sports cars. Two years ago, says Tribute Editor Maud Motanyane, black radicals would have dismissed buppies as "irrelevant to the struggle." Not anymore. "Black businessmen are not apologizing for what they have and what they have achieved. They are saying, 'We might own our own big cars and houses, but like you, we really don't own the freedom we all want.' " Builder Mahlalelae agrees that there has been a "change in attitude" among the young radicals. "Now," he explains, "they are not trying to intimidate me because I have a business and I am making money. They're saying, 'This is black money coming back home.' "
The present truce between the black revolutionary movement and the black middle class is not without precedent. The founders of the now outlawed African National Congress were professionals, teachers and churchmen who lobbied for civil rights in white-ruled South Africa 75 years ago. Later A.N.C. leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu were members of a black middle-class community that challenged the apartheid government after 1948.
Today's black business class contributes generously to antiapartheid organizations, and many militants now accept it as the protagonist in a new form of confrontation with whites that is taking place in the boardroom. "At one time black managers in South Africa were little more than token blacks in white business," says Morakile Shuenyane, a spokesman for the independent Black Management Forum. "Now it is the responsibility of black management to play a role model with the intention of melting white attitudes." Far from serving as quislings for the white establishment, the new black elite is emerging in its own right as a powerful arm of the liberation struggle.