South Africa: Extremes in Black and White

Negotiations to write a new constitution for South Africa have been under , way since December, but sometimes it seems as if the extremes — white and black — might first pull the country apart. The growing strength of the pro- apartheid Conservative Party has forced President F.W. de Klerk to hold a whites-only referendum on March 17 to shore up support for multiracial democracy. Meanwhile, black ultranationalists are demanding nothing less than De Klerk’s surrender of power. With the old order crumbling and the shape of the new uncertain, the country is riper than ever for the destructive influence of militants. Here are encounters with two of them.

Ga Rankuwa Township, 8 a.m. Thami Mcerwa, 27, president of the Azanian Youth Organization (AZAYO) — Azania is what his movement would rename South Africa — is preparing for another day’s work in “the struggle.” He spent the night as he usually does: in a four-room matchbox house in Soweto that he shares with his mother, brother and two sisters. Then he made the 50-mile journey north in his battered green Toyota to this black ghetto outside Pretoria.

Today his task is to deliver a eulogy for a fallen comrade. Before entering the scruffy cemetery on the edge of the township, Mcerwa takes off his T shirt, emblazoned with a picture of a guerrilla fighter triumphantly holding up an AK-47 rifle, and pulls on a dashiki, a loose-fitting African tunic. “Power!” he shouts to the 100 assembled mourners. “One Azania! One nation!” As a hot morning sun beats down, he angrily accuses a white-owned chemical company of murdering his comrade by exposing him to dangerous toxins on the job. “They think black life is so cheap!” he yells.

Pretoria, 4 p.m. Piet Rudolph, 54, a grim, potbellied former policeman wearing a khaki uniform with swastika-like emblems, slips into an empty basement restaurant. Run by a trusted friend, it is one of the places where he can hide if the police are looking for him. He prefers to stay in the shadows with the lights off as he settles into a corner table.

Although Rudolph is the press officer for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, known as the A.W.B., his job mainly involves covert preparations for what he sees as the coming war to defend the white “fatherland” against blacks. Rudolph, in fact, is regarded as the country’s most dangerous white terrorist. Though many continue to scoff at the A.W.B. as a comic-opera fringe group, that will change, Rudolph warns, when chaos descends upon South Africa.

Mcerwa’s hero is Steve Biko, the black nationalist leader whose 1977 death in police custody turned him into the country’s most celebrated black martyr. At 12 Mcerwa joined the 1976 Soweto uprising, the landmark outbreak of racial violence in which more than 100 blacks were killed. As he ran home after being teargassed, an older student who had been his political mentor was gunned down by the police.

Haunted by such bitter memories, Mcerwa rejects the conciliatory approach of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. “We want total liberation, not cosmetic changes,” he explains. “It may take some bloodshed. We may go into a civil-war struggle. But quick-fix solutions won’t work. As Steve Biko said, ‘It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die.’ “

Mcerwa has already come close to dying. In a fight with A.N.C. members two years ago, his head was slashed open with a panga. In another incident, an unknown assailant shot him in the chest. But these brushes with death have not softened his militancy a bit. He does not accept the A.N.C.’s decision to suspend military attacks and ease sanctions. “The highest form of negotiation,” he says, “is armed struggle.”

Whites, he contends, are oppressors with little role to play in the new South Africa. Afrikaners would have to accept minority status, and are barred from joining the Azanian organization. “Whites are part of the problem,” he says. “They can’t be part of the solution.”

Although Mcerwa’s movement is relatively small and ineffective, at times there is more to it than cliches and slogans. The young radical grabbed headlines in January when he led a campaign against pop star Paul Simon for violating AZAYO’s cultural boycott; during the singer’s tour in South Africa, Mcerwa was arrested for the seventh time in 10 years after a hand-grenade explosion damaged the Johannesburg offices of a music company providing Simon with technical assistance. The police released Mcerwa seven days later pending further inquiries.

As Rudolph sees it, the 3 million-strong Afrikaner volk inherited a glorious national legacy. “I received it as I received my mother’s milk,” he says. “I am a son of Africa. The graves of my people are here, and this is where my cradle stood.”

Together with leader Eugene TerreBlanche, Rudolph founded the A.W.B. in 1973. The most important of its objectives, he maintains, is the re- establishment of an Afrikaner nation in the Transvaal and Orange Free State provinces. Either large townships like Soweto would be partitioned out of the white state, or else blacks would simply have to accept white domination without complaint.

The A.W.B.’s pursuit of that goal has earned it a deserved reputation for being not only the most aggressively racist of all the right-wing groups but also the most violent. At the root of its militancy is what it terms the swart gevaar, or black threat, combined with a conviction that reforms during the past decade have amounted to a gradual capitulation to communist-inspired black domination.

Rudolph considers De Klerk a traitor for freeing and negotiating with Mandela. Last August A.W.B. storm troopers confronted police outside a hall where the President was speaking; in the ensuing clash, two A.W.B. men and a black bystander were killed. Rudolph and other leaders were arrested and will stand trial this month.

The “Battle of Ventersdorp,” as Rudolph proudly calls it, was not his first run-in with the white authorities. In 1990 he broke into air-force headquarters in Pretoria and stole a large cache of weapons. With the police on his tail, he disappeared underground for six months and tried to organize commando cells. To spark a Boer revolt, he went on a bombing spree, targeting the offices of two senior De Klerk aides and Melrose House, the historic site of the 1902 Afrikaner surrender in the Anglo-Boer War.

It is no coincidence that Rudolph’s exploits parallel those of his defiant forebears. Piet was named for a relative who commanded the cannons in the 1838 battle of Blood River, when the Boers defeated the Zulus and won control of considerable territory. As a boy, Rudolph spent hours listening to tales told by an old soldier who had been blinded by wounds received in the turn-of-the- century Anglo-Boer conflict.

In Rudolph’s mind, though, the proud memories are overwhelmed by enduring resentments. He vividly remembers how Afrikaners were persecuted by the richer, more powerful British. He felt the sting growing up on the gold reef east of Johannesburg, the son of a poor white miner who believed he was exploited by English capitalists. Even after Afrikaners won absolute power in 1948, Rudolph continued to feel inferior. Upon being taunted for his poor grammar as a young policeman, he recalls, “I decided it was the last time I would be treated this way by an English-speaker.”

After several years in the security branch, Rudolph left the police in 1967 to pursue political office. As a candidate for the ultra-right Reconstituted National Party, he lost four parliamentary elections. “It was impossible to get the support of South Africa for the Boer republic,” he says. “The only way was an unconstitutional struggle.”

Mcerwa ponders the question, What will he do if the current negotiations lead to the formation of an interim government that includes Mandela? The A.N.C., he replies, has been co-opted by De Klerk. It has betrayed the people. “If the masses believe this government is undemocratic, we will resist,” he says.

By now, Mcerwa has arrived back in Soweto for another organizational meeting. At a small dwelling that doubles as a comrade’s home and an AZAYO branch office, he runs into Khosto Seathlolo, a leader of the 1970s’ student protests who was sidelined by a long prison sentence. “He is one of our famous activists,” Mcerwa explains. “No, Thami,” Seathlolo replies. “You young guys are going to be the heroes.”

As Afrikaner civil servants stream out of Pretoria heading for their middle- class suburbs, Rudolph is eager to make a move. It may not be much longer, he speculates, before South Africa descends into civil war. If De Klerk hands over power to the A.N.C., he predicts, the volk will fight. If the pro- apartheid Conservative Party defeats De Klerk in his reform referendum, then it will be the blacks who rise up. Either way, the Boers stand to lose whatever powers and privileges they enjoyed during the apartheid years. “Time has run out in our land,” Rudolph says. “Now this cannot be resolved without a fight.” With that, he slips out the back exit, off to another meeting to plan the African-Boer war.