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There is no assurance that Mandela's call will be heeded. To the Young Lions, the militant youths who once battled the security forces for control of the black townships, Hani was a force more powerful and popular than Mandela. He had been counted upon to "sell" a compromise settlement to his millions of young followers. His death, said a supporter ominously, "will cause a lot of discontent."
Most whites regarded Hani as little more than a terrorist. "Live by the sword, die by the sword," taunted an unidentified man calling a Johannesburg radio talk show after Hani's death was announced. Privately, many of Hani's A.N.C. colleagues suggest that a hidden hand within the state's security apparatus was behind the assassination. Hani had repeatedly accused the security forces of harboring hit squads and vowed that a future A.N.C. government would carry out total reform of the army and police. Not all Hani's enemies were white, however. He was also resented by former A.N.C. guerrillas who claimed that during the 1980s, dissidents were executed and tortured in exile camps under his leadership.
Although Hani echoed the radical rhetoric of the Young Lions, the long racial struggle had transformed him into a powerful voice for negotiated change. As he had risen above his country's separate-and-unequal education system to become a classics scholar, Hani had moved from his militant past to become a political pragmatist. "It will be unrealistic not to accept compromises in the negotiations," he said in an interview with TIME last November. "We have not defeated the other side."
It was Hani's nature to savor the paradoxes of being black in a white-ruled land. After he returned from exile in 1990, along with other A.N.C. comrades, he chose not to move to the townships where he was worshipped, renting instead in Boksburg, a suburb known for its conservative, racist whites. As it turned out, he got along well with his new neighbors. Though his death may set back the cause of peace temporarily, it is such spirit that will ultimately save South Africa from itself.