Something ominous was forgotten over the past two years as President F.W. de Klerk went about burying apartheid and accepting praise from grateful citizens and foreign statesmen: even more than in the past, South Africa's 5 million whites and 28.5 million blacks were living in separate worlds. Whites, of course, continued to enjoy the comfort and security of leafy suburbs. At least two-thirds of them were prepared to share governance with blacks -- but not to surrender all their power or any of their wealth. Life in the matchbox townships, meanwhile, became a daily nightmare unimagined by whites. Not only were jobs a rarity because of the recession, but blacks were dying in a spasm of political violence that was deadlier -- at least 8,000 killed since 1989 -- than any before De Klerk took office. Shut out of the country's good life, black South Africans are all the more impatient to acquire the power whites have exercised to their own advantage for so long.
When negotiations between De Klerk's government and Nelson Mandela's African National Congress collapsed last week, it was attributable as much to a collision between these diverging worlds as it was to the failure of the negotiators or the latest massacre of blacks. That is one reason why the breakdown has caused so much anguish among people of all races. After more than two years of progress, they were suddenly asking themselves whether their remarkable attempt at reconciliation might actually fail, and with disastrous consequences. "I can only say," wrote Allister Sparks, the South African journalist and author, "that I despaired for our country."
The immediate cause of the breakdown was the A.N.C.'s indignation over the particularly pitiless slaughter of 42 people in Boipatong, near Johannesburg. Discontent has grown intense in A.N.C. ranks over the ceaseless violence. When Mandela visited Boipatong last week, he and his entourage were taunted by a song that included the lyrics: "While they kill our people, you behave like lambs."
But there are more fundamental reasons for the decision to withdraw from the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA). The A.N.C. is deeply frustrated by both the one-sided power De Klerk has wielded in the negotiations and their failure to yield tangible change.
To the A.N.C., the two problems go hand in hand. Secretary-General Cyril Ramaphosa blamed De Klerk for the massacre, accusing the government of pursuing a strategy that "embraces negotiations together with systematic covert actions, including murder." Survivors of the atrocity accused Zulu migrant workers staying at a local hostel and loyal to the Inkatha Freedom Party of carrying out the killings -- but the survivors also claim that government security forces took part in the attack.
Privately, A.N.C. leaders say they do not believe De Klerk is orchestrating a Machiavellian plot. They understand that part of the problem is a culture of intolerance and factional hostility from which their own members are hardly immune. They do angrily blame the President, however, for cynically doing little to stop the bloodshed in the hope that it will exacerbate divisions in the massive black electorate and hinder the A.N.C.'s ability to build a strong political organization in the townships.