Afrikaners See Signs of Doom Under New Policy : South Africa: The right wing does not buy the dream of a peaceful, multiracial future. And it’s ready to take up arms.

All the nations surrounded me, but in the name of the Lord I cut them off. . . . They swarmed around me like bees, but they died out as quickly as burning thorns.

--Psalms 118:11-12

In times of desperation, the white Afrikaner has always found solace and sustenance in his Bible, particularly in the Psalms, which he quotes from memory, and in prayer, for which he kneels daily.

“We stand here as members of an assailed nation,” the Rev. Jan Henrik Boshoff prayed recently, his head bowed over a well-thumbed Bible. “We call on your Holy Name against the heathens. Help us break down these heathen masses.”

In God’s name, many of the descendants of South Africa’s Afrikaner settlers today are seeking deliverance from their own vision of Apocalypse: a future without the protection of racial segregation, crushed beneath black majority rule.

They see signs of doom everywhere as the government loosens its grip on peaceful protest, from the red flags of the outlawed South African Communist Party that fluttered with impunity over an unprecedented anti-government rally of 70,000 people in Soweto on a recent Sunday to the unmuzzled revolutionary rhetoric of black guerrilla leaders freed unconditionally last month from life sentences.

“It’s a very dangerous situation the government has allowed to develop,” Andries Treurnicht, a pastor and leader of the Conservative Party, said recently. By allowing mass ANC protests, he added, “they are creating a climate of resistance--and a climate of victory” for the ANC.

Even some of President Frederik W. de Klerk’s ardent supporters said that they felt uncomfortable with the open display of support at the Oct. 29 rally for the Communist Party, which was outlawed in 1960 along with its ally the African National Congress. (Some, but not all, leaders of the ANC are members of the Communist Party.)

Amid De Klerk’s promises to dismantle apartheid and share power with blacks, the country’s estimated 1 million right-wing whites have become an increasingly important spoiler in the republic’s dreams of a peaceful, multiracial future.

Over their dinner tables, in their churches and around the monuments to their unbending spirit, rising in steel and stone on the veld, these white South Africans beseech the Lord to stop De Klerk from selling out to black Africans what they consider their birthright.

And if it comes to it, as many believe it will, they say they are prepared and morally obliged to take up arms to protect the purity of Afrikaner culture from the “heathen masses.”

At a recent meeting of these whites, Mike Pentz, a Pretoria factory supervisor, bowed his head and nodded agreement with Boshoff’s prayer. Pentz, a father of four, had one tattooed arm around the shoulders of his son, Coenraad, a blond 9-year-old who, like his father, was wearing the khaki slacks and shirt favored by right-wing whites.

“Today in South Africa, a white skin means nothing, and a black skin means everything,” Pentz said later, expressing a view widely shared by conservatives. “Who built up this country, white people or black people?”

The first Pentzes landed at Cape Town in 1721 from Europe and later joined Dutch- and French-descended settlers, known as Boers, in the Great Trek of 1835 to escape British colonial rule of the Cape of Good Hope area. The trekkers established renegade republics in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, and many today fly the Vierkleur, the four-color flag of the first Boer republic, rather than the modern flag of South Africa.

Afrikanerdom, a cultural and ethnic group unique to South Africa, has been split for seven years between those, such as government officials, who see blacks and whites sharing power in a united South Africa, and rightists who want to carve up the country so that blacks and whites can live in their own separate, sovereign nations.

The factions seem to agree on one thing: Four decades of white-minority rule, in which 3 million Afrikaners and 2 million other whites have dominated 26 million voteless blacks, must come to an end without sacrificing the Afrikaner language and culture.

The way whites like Pentz see it, though, De Klerk and his predecessor, President Pieter W. Botha, caved in to international pressure and restive blacks. De Klerk, who argues that the country can be ruled by consensus rather than by black majority rule, is regarded as a traitor by some for removing some apartheid legislation from the books and easing restrictions on anti-apartheid protest.

“He’s betrayed the Afrikaner people and is trying to drive us out of our country,” Pentz said. “But we’re not going to lie down and take it.”

That was why Pentz and more than 1,000 other whites gathered around a statue of bemedaled Afrikaner folk hero Paul Kruger in Pretoria’s Church Square a few weeks ago to pray for divine intervention. Their concerns about the government had come to a head when protesting blacks surrounded Kruger’s statue as police merely watched, obeying De Klerk’s orders to allow peaceful protest.

De Klerk came under fire from the right last month for releasing 77-year-old Walter Sisulu and other black and Indian leaders of the ANC, and for allowing crowds carrying ANC flags to sing and dance in the streets to celebrate.

The government has been reluctant to ignore the far right, which has siphoned off much of the ruling National Party’s traditional Afrikaner support. In fact, the Conservative Party collected 700,000 votes in the September parliamentary elections--30% of the total white tally and about half the Afrikaner vote. Conservative Party-controlled city councils have replaced the ruling National Party in dozens of towns in the past year.

Conservative leaders believe that their support will increase as De Klerk edges toward talks with black leaders, because whites will begin to doubt that the government can protect a white minority from black domination.

Thousands of Conservative Party voters are members of even more militant organizations, such as the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) and the Boer Freedom Movement. The AWB has threatened to disrupt black protest, and right-wing attacks have increased in recent months in South Africa and Pretoria-ruled Namibia, where a U.N. independence plan is about to turn the territory over to black majority rule. Two AWB members were charged last month with a machine-gun and grenade attack on a U.N. office in Namibia, in which a Namibian security guard died.

South Africa’s conservatives maintain they are not racist, although many consider blacks to be less sophisticated and less capable than whites. Instead, they consider themselves segregationists, believing that blacks and whites want, and were meant by God, to live separate lives under their own governments.

“I’ve got nothing against the black,” said J. C. du Plessis, 67, a retired civil servant. “I’ll help him. I won’t begrudge him anything in life. Hell, I’ve spent thousands of rands in taxes to help him. But I don’t want him in my schools or my home. I don’t want to live with him.”

As evidence of God’s plan, the conservatives point to the biblical story of creation, underlining the words “after their own kind.”

“I don’t read apartheid in the Bible, but I read about the diversity of God’s people,” said Prof. Carel W. H. Boshoff, a former missionary in South Africa’s black townships and now head of the Afrikaner Volkswag, a conservative cultural organization. “And today we feel the whole Afrikaner culture is at stake.”

An enduring theme of the far-right movement, and one that is shared with very liberal whites, is that it is immoral for white South Africans to deny voting rights to blacks in order to maintain their privileged status.

“It’s paternalism, is what it is,” said Suzette Booyens, a high school mathematics teacher in Pretoria. “We want to give blacks their own freedom, in their own country. We don’t hate them.

“Maybe we appear selfish, but we want to have our own culture for our own people,” she added. “And the blacks want that, too.”

Booyens and many other like-minded whites back up those words by refusing to hire black servants, a rarity in a country where hundreds of thousands of black men and women toil as maids, nannies, drivers and gardeners for whites.

“I believe in working yourself and using your own people to work for you,” said Booyens, whose family roots in South Africa go back 300 years.

The specter that conservative whites most fear is the very thing that many Americans consider the key to their country’s success: the melting pot of diverse cultures. And they support that argument by citing recent incidents of racial violence in the United States.

“You can’t put all these (black and white) cultures together and just put the lid on,” said Booyens’ husband, Danie, a 52-year-old consultant for white-owned businesses fending off black union organizers. “It will explode.”