Talks With Rebels Sway Whites’ Views : Afrikaners Get ANC’s Side of Story on Trips Abroad

The white Afrikaners could hardly believe it. They were dancing with the enemy, sharing beef grilled to smoky perfection at a traditional braaivleis , sipping South African brandy, swapping stories about their country and being introduced as “compatriots from back home.”

The occasion was the wedding of an African National Congress guerrilla’s daughter, and the white visitors from South Africa were kindling feelings that a lifetime of fear and distrust had all but snuffed out.

“If I told people in South Africa about these feelings they’d try to tell me it was just guilt for what’s been done to blacks, but these friendships are too normal and relaxed to be guilt,” said Gerhard Erasmus, a law professor at Stellenbosch University, which has trained generations of South Africa’s white leaders.

In ever-growing numbers, influential white lawyers and business executives, sports leaders and students, homemakers and clerics are meeting the ANC in Europe or Zimbabwe or here at ANC exile headquarters in Zambia. And these pilgrimages have begun to fundamentally change the attitudes of thousands of white South Africans toward the outlawed ANC, the principal guerrilla group fighting white minority-led rule.

Government-supporting Afrikaans-language newspapers are making unprecedented calls for talks with the ANC. White lawyers are studying and debating the ANC’s constitutional proposals. Academics are telling a new generation of white students about their meetings with the ANC. And the government tirades that once greeted returning ANC visitors are increasingly rare.

“The climate has changed dramatically,” said Alex Boraine, co-founder of the Institute for a Democratic Alternative in South Africa, a two-year-old group that has arranged many of the meetings. The small, Cape Town-based organization has fielded more than 100 requests this year for meetings with the ANC and with radical black leaders inside South Africa.

“The ANC has been portrayed by the government as a group of men with a bomb in each hand and a knife between their teeth,” Boraine said. “We set out to demythologize the ANC. And it’s working.”

The change also appears to have affected the ANC, which has begun to tone down its guerrilla war and shy away from civilian targets, the area of most concern to whites.

“There’s been a qualitative shift in thinking in the ANC,” a Western diplomat in Lusaka said. “For the first time, they’re playing power politics.”

Negotiations Possible

If the ANC can undermine support for the government among the 5 million whites, who choose the country’s leaders, then it may force Pretoria to the negotiating table, some analysts say.

So far this year, groups of 17 college students, 31 lawyers and 55 women leaders have made highly publicized visits to the ANC, and many dozens of others have made visits on their own.

Few if any of the white visitors have joined the black liberation movement, and most still disapprove of the ANC’s guerrilla war and sanctions campaign. But they say they wanted to see the ANC because, with wide support among South Africa’s 4-to-1 black majority, it is an important player in the country’s future.

“I want to live in South Africa,” said Prof. Erasmus, whose Dutch ancestors settled in South Africa in 1665. “I’ve got three young children. My future is at stake. You can’t ignore reality. You can’t wish away the existence of the ANC.”

Erasmus was part of a delegation of influential white South African lawyers who met ANC lawyers and officials this year to debate the ANC’s proposals for a post-apartheid constitution in South Africa.

“I’m not interested in trading one bad system for another,” he said. “I’m interested in a true non-racial society where there is room for me.”

The 77-year-old ANC has been outlawed in South Africa for nearly three decades and, because the words of ANC leaders are banned there, most whites know only what the government has told them--that the ANC is a terrorist organization trying to overthrow the government and set up a Marxist state.

‘Resist the Propaganda’

“It’s not a war between the devil and the angels,” said Laurie Ackermann, a former district court judge who attended the constitutional conference. “One must try hard to resist the propaganda from both the ANC and the government.”

Although wary of the ANC at first, Ackermann was impressed that the predominantly black exile leaders genuinely seemed to want to debate. For an Afrikaner, “it was a very liberating experience,” Ackermann said. “It gave me hope for the future of our country.”

It was the second time Ackermann had come face to face with the ANC. The first time, in his courtroom in 1987, he sentenced an ANC member to eight years in prison and two others to six years for treason, one of the lighter terms ever imposed for treason.

These public visits to the ANC began two years ago when about 50 influential white South Africans met ANC leaders in Dakar, Senegal. At home the whites were denounced by some as traitors and by others as foolish liberals who had been hoodwinked by terrorists in three-piece suits.

Sports Boycott

A surge of white interest in meeting with the ANC began last October, when Danie Craven, the 78-year-old chief of South Africa’s rugby board and a government supporter, met ANC Secretary General Alfred Nzo in an effort to break a worldwide sports boycott against South Africa.

Rugby is the most popular sport among white South Africans, and Craven, desperate to line up matches with African countries, declared that “the road to Africa is through the ANC.”

The rugby board’s executive committee, under intense government pressure, later backed down, but Craven’s action seemed to embolden other moderate whites.

A group of student leaders from the Establishment’s Stellenbosch University, defying the university administration and student council, spent several days with the ANC last month, as several of their professors had done a few months before. The students came away surprised by “the maturity and depth within the (ANC) political organization,” student Mark Behr said.

Stiff Introductions

The meetings typically begin with stiff introductions, but within a few days, the guests usually find they have much in common with their hosts and friendships begin to blossom in Lusaka restaurants and taverns.

The ANC members are thirsty for information about their birthplace, and they ask the “passport-carrying South Africans,” as the white visitors are called here, about everything from the Johannesburg building boom to the latest increase in the price of gasoline.

The guests bring newspapers and traditional South African foods, such as smoked snoek , a favorite fish of the homesick exiles, and they occasionally get together for South Africa’s favorite weekend pastime--the braaivleis , or barbecue, well lubricated with South African beer and wine.

Told of Fears

A small bridge was built one night recently at the Pamodzi Hotel’s bar when two white journalists from a pro-government newspaper confided to an ANC information officer their fears about a country ruled by blacks.

“For me, it was a memorable night,” said Tom Sebina, the ANC member.

Weeks later, one of the journalists called Sebina from a Cape Town hospital to announce the birth of his first child.

Erasmus remembers staying up until 3 a.m. listening to an ANC member tell of his experiences at the prison on Robben Island.

“It opened a whole new world to us white guys coming from home,” Erasmus said.

The government argues that the ANC has used its charismatic members to dupe white visitors and enhance its international reputation.

“It’s clear that the ANC is showing two faces,” Minister of Law and Order Adriaan Vlok told Parliament last month after several dozen white women met female ANC members. “One is a friendly face and the other is one of continuing violence.”

The ANC has not won many white supporters for its armed struggle, but it does manage to find some areas of agreement with its guests.

Respected Ambassador

“Our basic message is that the apartheid system is wrong and must go, so let all of us join hands to abolish it,” said Thabo Mbeki, who is information director of the ANC, a member of its executive committee and one of its most respected ambassadors.

Mbeki and others try to assuage fears about a black-majority government. They assure visitors that Afrikaans, the language of most whites, would not be banned, that there would be religious freedom and that whites would be allowed in government.

Some political analysts believe that the increasing contacts between the ANC and white South Africa may one day lead to peace talks. But the government still refuses to negotiate until the ANC renounces violence, and the ANC will not come to the table until the government releases political prisoners and lifts the ban on anti-apartheid groups.

Mounting Support

Some white attitudes are beginning to change, though. Johan Heyns, leader of the Dutch Reformed Church, to which President Pieter W. Botha and most of his Cabinet belong, said recently that refusing to negotiate with the ANC until it renounces violence is like refusing to treat an alcoholic until he gives up drink.

In any case, the ANC believes that its guerrilla war has already brought at least a few South Africans to the table.

“Without the armed struggle, few of these whites would have wanted to come to Lusaka,” the ANC’s Mbeki said. “They would have been cozy and happy, thinking the ‘natives’ were happy.”

Now that the ANC has their ear, Mbeki added, “we have a responsibility to tell them that there is a way out of this crisis.”