COLUMN ONE : Trapped Between 2 Worlds : Respected at work but denied basic freedoms, South Africa’s middle-class blacks have grown even more embittered than the poor.

Down at the office, Gideon Skhosana is a man respected. He directs a district sales team, charts the performance of his salespeople on pegboards and schmoozes with the big customers.

Skhosana jokes easily there, tilting his goateed chin back with a booming laugh. That relaxed sense of humor and his marketing skills make him “a super bloke to work for,” says his secretary, who is white.

But down at the New Lantern, one of Welkom’s most popular drive-in restaurants, Gideon Skhosana is just another black man. His family eats on paper plates inside the car while his secretary’s family and the other white diners are served on china, at picnic tables shaded by thatch umbrellas.

And on the drive home, when Skhosana leaves the wide, palm-lined boulevards of Welkom for the dusty, congested ghetto of Motse Thabong, the last warmth of the respect he feels at the office is chilled away.

There’s usually a police roadblock at the township entrance, where he and other blacks who work in the mining town are stopped. His company car is searched by grim-faced police looking for automatic pistols and limpet mines in the mornings, gold nuggets in the evenings.

These are the two worlds of one angry black man in South Africa.

Giving blacks an economic stake in the system was the government’s idea. It figured that the more black people with new cars and microwave ovens, steady paychecks and tall mortgages, the fewer black people agitating for rapid change or revolution.

But it hasn’t worked out that way.

One million black men and women have ascended into the middle class and beyond in recent years only to become even more embittered than their poorer neighbors by the system that dictates where they may live and denies them a vote on their own future.

From the outside, they often appear content with the status quo, their silence bought and paid for by the government. But, in their hearts, they resent being prevented from enjoying all the privileges of a hefty paycheck. Many yearn to run this country, a prospect even the new reform-minded president doesn’t contemplate. And they’ve become an impatient and quietly militant force for their own liberation.

“You can make us managers and give us a lot of money, but if you don’t get rid of apartheid, if you don’t stop treating us differently from whites, we’re nothing but the wealthy, educated oppressed,” the Rev. Frank Chikane, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, says.

“There’s no way they can co-opt me in that type of system.”

Gideon Skhosana works in Welkom, a community of parks, clean streets and 60,000 white residents. The name means “welcome” in the language of the white Afrikaners, and the town sits at the crossroads of farming and mining on the vast platteland of the Orange Free State, for generations the prairie home of South Africa’s most conservative whites.

Most white folks here think integration, or “mixing,” is something that happens only far away, in big cities like Johannesburg, for instance, where in their view too many white do-gooders have opened the floodgates. In the clean, modern short-stack building where Skhosana works, a doctor’s office has a sign, in Afrikaans, directing “blacks and Coloreds” to a separate waiting room.

Gold makes Welkom’s economy glitter, and black labor makes the gold mines run. The area has 40 mine shafts, seven of them inside the city limits, and the town has sprouted around 50-foot-tall ridges of bleached-white soil, the mines’ byproduct.

‘Place of Happiness’

Most of the black workers in those mines live on the outskirts of Welkom under a perennial haze of coal smoke in the township of Motse Thabong, a Zulu phrase meaning “place of happiness.” About 80,000 blacks live there in small, square houses along potholed roads paved in litter.

Gideon, his wife Maureen, and their 2-year-old daughter, Kanabo, came house-hunting three years ago when South African Breweries offered Skhosana a job in its Welkom office. They had been renting in Soweto, the 2.2-million population township near Johannesburg, but the new job gave them enough money to buy.

They could afford to live in one of Welkom’s garden suburbs, where the ranch-style homes, back-yard swimming pools and leafy cul-de-sacs resemble many neighborhoods in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. The real estate market there is soft, with too many houses and not enough buyers, and departing residents often complain about how difficult it is to sell their homes.

But the Group Areas Act prevents Skhosana from living there. That 40-year-old law, which even the new reform-minded government is committed to preserving, means blacks who work in Welkom must live in Thabong, where housing is scarce.

The Skhosanas settled on a three-bedroom brick home for $20,000 in a new subdivision, at the time the fanciest in the township, where police officers, post office workers, lawyers and teachers live.

It looks like many American working-class neighborhoods, with nearly identical houses on tiny plots fenced in chain-link. But there are no trees or street lights and only a few paved roads. Frequent power outages bathe the neighborhood in darkness.

“If I had a choice, I wouldn’t live here,” Skhosana said, sitting in a living room only slightly larger than his downtown office. “I’d rather live in a white area. Not because it’s white, but because it’s better.”

The Skhosanas and their closest neighbors have stuffed their houses with an array of furnishings not generally found elsewhere in the township. Their kitchens have built-in Kelvinator ovens with smoked-glass windows. Skhosana’s living room has soft imitation-leather sofas, an Oriental rug, glass coffee tables, a stereo system, a color television and a VCR. Maureen Skhosana parks her 1979 Volkswagen Beetle in the one-car garage. Skhosana himself keeps the company Toyota in the yard, inside the fence, to thwart thieves.

When the Skhosanas and their friends get together, the talk is about jobs and politics, sports and house designs, private schools and servants. On the kitchen counter the other day, next to the food processor, was the latest issue of Fair Lady, a magazine whose motto is, “The Chic of It.”

Maureen, a social worker, has a full-time black housekeeper who doubles as a baby-sitter when Kanabo arrives home from St. Andrews, a private, multiracial school where she is in first grade.

The Skhosana family’s life style is one of the reasons blacks are the fastest-growing consumer market in South Africa, where 26 million of them outnumber whites 5-to-1. Black buying power will overtake white within the next decade, researchers say, and black-oriented magazines are thick with ads for everything from vinyl flooring to Chivas Regal to BMWs.

Tribute Magazine, for example, regularly analyzes stock market investments and reviews books selling for more than $35. Alongside society photographs, it recently profiled 100 self-made black businessmen, including one who owns a race horse that he runs under the black, green and gold colors of the outlawed African National Congress, the principal guerrilla group fighting Pretoria.

By its sheer numbers, the black middle class is forcing open doors once closed by the government. Blacks may now own homes and run businesses with fewer restrictions, but they still need permission to do business in most white towns.

‘Shock Absorbers’

Black men like Skhosana have begun to appear in the corporate suites, with fancy titles, big desks, white secretaries--and, sometimes, no real authority. Skhosana calls them “shock absorbers,” hired to attract black customers or as a hedge against the day when a black government comes to power.

Black executives sometimes feel caught between the white and black worlds, belonging to neither.

“You’re not accepted by your white colleagues because you’re a radical, but then you go back to the ghetto and they see you as an instrument of capitalism, a sell-out,” says Dexter Selepe, a 32-year-old black accountant with Arthur Anderson & Co. in Johannesburg.

“It’s tough. We have to go back to our ghetto every night, back to our people, and contribute to the struggle,” adds Selepe, who does that by teaching mathematics in night school in Soweto.

Tens of thousands solve the problem by moving illegally into white urban neighborhoods, where they pay exorbitant rents and risk being reported by their neighbors and evicted. But they often feel as if they’ve abandoned the struggle of their people and part of their cultural identity.

“Just because I live in a white neighborhood and have lots of white friends, my people think that means I’m not politically interested any more,” says Eric Mafuna, who conducts marketing surveys of black consumers for white firms.

‘Don’t Understand’

“But they don’t understand,” Mafuna says. “Revolutions are never fomented by the masses. They are the numbers, of course. But the black middle class supplies the leadership.”

Thami Mazwai, an editor at the Sowetan newspaper, sends his young daughter to a private, multiracial school in the white suburbs of Johannesburg. He likes the fact that she is learning she can get better grades, and worse grades, than white pupils. But he’s worried about the cultural implications.

“Very few of us, no matter how strong our heritage, can claim we aren’t being co-opted culturally,” Mazwai said. “She’s becoming a little white girl, and I’m not sure I like that.”

Skhosana’s employer, South African Breweries, is a multimillion-dollar company that produces seven brands of beer and holds a virtual monopoly on beer sales in southern Africa. Its most popular product, Castle Lager, ranks seventh in the world in total consumption.

The Welkom office is responsible for the northern Orange Free State, which consumes 21 million gallons of beer a month, and Skhosana originally was hired to oversee the region’s black business and two black salesmen. But the company merged the white and black divisions in Welkom this year and appointed Skhosana, now 34, as director.

When Skhosana’s white supervisor, Justus Hill, announced the promotion in a letter to the liquor stores, restaurants and taverns in the territory, a few customers telephoned to complain.

“We don’t want that kafir in our stalls,” said one, using the derogatory word for blacks. But Hill told them the company had taken a stand: Blacks consume most of the beer “and that’s the market we must protect.”

“People hate change here,” admits Morag Williams, Skhosana’s 33-year-old secretary. “But they’re adjusting to Gideon. They can see he’s capable and he’s handling them very well.

“It wasn’t so long ago that it would have been infra dig to report to a black guy,” she adds. “But people are enlightening themselves.”

That enlightenment has taken longer than Skhosana had hoped, though. The owner of a chain of bottle stores still refuses to have lunch with him, saying it’s “against my principles” to eat with a black man. Another customer refused to shake Skhosana’s extended hand at a breweries’ cocktail party.

Even inside his office, Skhosana’s large oak desk doesn’t protect him from the racial insults that are part of South Africa’s social fabric.

A white technician who came to repair an office computer recently asked the receptionist where he could get one of the complimentary ties that the company gives clients. She referred him to the white depot manager, who referred him to Skhosana.

“What’s happened at the breweries?” the technician complained to Skhosana. “The missus tells me to talk to the baas (boss) and the baas says I should talk to the ‘boy.’ ”

Skhosana shouted him out of the office and telephoned the man’s company to complain. The next day, the technician apologized.

Skhosana’s new job made him the direct supervisor of the region’s two white salesmen, and he wasn’t sure how he should treat them.

“It’s hard to relax with them,” Skhosana says. “They might not know when I’m joking and when I’m not.”

One of the two had no difficulty making the transition, but the other was uncomfortable accepting orders from a black man, according to Skhosana’s secretary. Six months later, Skhosana, with his supervisor’s backing, fired both men for poor performance. He’s interviewing white applicants now for the jobs.

As he walks the streets of Welkom, Skhosana is frequently reminded of his second-class status. His application to join each of the three health clubs in town was turned down.

“I wouldn’t mind,” one club owner assured him, Skhosana remembers. “But most of my clients don’t like to work out with blacks.”

Apartheid is a system of exclusion, and the black middle class, raised on the promise of opportunity, comes to feel that exclusion most acutely.

“The system is designed so that the middle class cannot be absorbed into it,” says Thabo Mbeki, director of foreign affairs for the exiled African National Congress. “So it’s inevitable that they will still be excluded, no matter how big their houses or paychecks.”

The day-to-day indignities, accepted as a fact of life by most working-class blacks in South Africa, often make Skhosana angry enough to fight back.

A sales clerk at OK Bazaars department store, which relies heavily on the black trade, looked past Maureen Skhosana one day to wait on white people standing in line behind her. Gideon called the head of the company to complain. No apology was forthcoming, though.

His secretary, Morag Williams, like most whites in South Africa, thinks blacks are accepted everywhere as equals. “There’s no place they can’t eat now,” she says.

But only a few days earlier, the owner of J.J.’s Restaurant turned Skhosana and his wife away in an apologetic but firm tone: “We’re not open for blacks.”

In another restaurant, Skhosana received his ice cream in a chipped bowl and went to the counter to ask for another.

“No white would complain about that,” he was told by the white proprietor.

When Skhosana first moved to Welkom, he promised himself that he would avoid the New Lantern restaurant because its owners forced blacks to eat in their cars while allowing whites to use the tables.

‘No Alternatives’

“But sometimes, when it’s 11 at night, you’ve got nowhere else to go,” Skhosana says. “I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted. But what frustrates me is that there are no alternatives. I hate for my child to see that.”

Skhosana was radicalized long before he joined the affluent middle class.

He was born in a mud shack on a white man’s farm and christened Zulu Gideon Theopolus Skhosana. Tofie, as he was called, lived there with his grandparents, his parents and five sisters. When his father refused to work on the farm, the landowner evicted the entire family. Tofie was 6 at the time.

The family moved to Soweto, where all three generations of Skhosanas lived under the roof of a four-room house, supported by his father’s job at an appliance store in downtown Johannesburg.

Tofie earned a scholarship to the Inkamana High boarding school in Natal province, where he led a delegation to the principal, asking that boys and girls be allowed to take a weekend trip together. The principal, a German nun, wrote his parents that Tofie was a “bad element.”

At a Mass the next year, he asked fellow students to pray for leaders of demonstrations in support of revolutionaries in neighboring Mozambique. He was summoned to the principal’s office and told he could either continue to study at Inkamana or leave to enter politics.

“But I want to do both,” he remembers telling the nuns.

Skhosana had his first day-to-day contact with whites while riding the train to school each term.

“The (white) guards and conductors would shout at us, beat us and cram us all into small compartments while whites were allowed lots of space,” he remembers. “I thought of them as slave drivers.”

But later he came to realize that “not all whites were racists,” Skhosana says. “It’s not a color issue. It’s just about power.”

Skhosana went to Fort Hare University, a center of black activism, and in 1977 helped organize a prayer meeting in memory of Steve Biko, the black consciousness leader who had died in police custody. Skhosana and 600 other students were arrested and spent two weeks in jail before being acquitted.

After graduation, he went to work at Colgate Palmolive, where the security police visited the manager to suggest that a close eye be kept on the new employee. Skhosana moved through a series of marketing jobs, steadily improving his salary and position.

Skhosana’s open sympathy with the black liberation struggle, his continuing friendship with several political prisoners on Robben Island and his public defense of the banned African National Congress has often stunned his white co-workers.

He had been in the breweries job about a week when a black colleague called the office to say his child was missing.

“Oh God!” an office secretary exclaimed. “Maybe the ANC got him.”

“But the child’s only 3 years old,” Skhosana said.

“Do you think they care?” she responded.

Skhosana raised his voice in anger.

“They aren’t animals!” he said. “They’re human beings.”

(It later turned out that the child, a girl, had wandered off with friends. She was found later in the day.)

While some middle-class blacks are grateful for a gradual whittling away of apartheid, many, like Skhosana, are increasingly impatient with the slow rate of change and unfulfilled promises of reform.

“I’d be willing to lose my job to have things change in this country, rather than quietly accept piecemeal destruction,” Skhosana says. “Maybe I wouldn’t even vote if I could. I probably wouldn’t move to Ribestadt (a wealthy white neighborhood) and move in next to an Afrikaner, either. But the thing is to have the right.”