South Africa Regime Slates ANC Meeting : Apartheid: White minority government to have first official meeting with long-outlawed black group in breakthrough.

South Africa’s white minority government, announcing a major political breakthrough, said today that it will hold its first official meeting with the long-outlawed African National Congress on April 11.

President Frederik W. de Klerk said he will meet ANC leaders including Nelson R. Mandela, the movement’s newly appointed deputy president, whom he freed last month after 27 years in prison for plotting to overthrow white rule.

The meeting is a first step toward negotiations on a new constitution to enfranchise South Africa’s black majority.

“The state president, assisted by members of the Cabinet, will discuss with Mr. Mandela and the ANC leaders from outside and from within the country the obstacles perceived to obstruct the process toward negotiations,” De Klerk said in a statement.

Mandela is due back in South Africa on Saturday after a tour of African and European countries that reunited him with ANC leaders exiled since the guerrilla movement was banned in 1960.

De Klerk lifted the ban in February in one of a series of sweeping reforms of four decades of apartheid race segregation.

Speaking in Stockholm, where he was visiting ailing ANC President Oliver Tambo, Mandela said the meeting with the South African government will have to be more than a formality if negotiations are to go ahead.

“Our strategy is going to be that the very first meeting between the ANC and the government must produce a result if we are going to continue talking,” he said in a radio interview.

Fears for the future of negotiations have been fueled by a wave of unrest which has swept black townships and tribal homelands in the past month and cost more than 200 lives.

Some of the worst violence has been in the 10 self-governing homelands created under apartheid, where millions of blacks forced by Pretoria to give up South African citizenship fear that they will miss out on De Klerk’s promised reforms.

Government officials say they cannot lift a 3-year-old state of emergency until the unrest subsides. An end to the state of emergency is one of the ANC’s key conditions to negotiations.

Mandela and other anti-apartheid leaders have repeatedly called for an end to the violence, and the need for black unity before negotiations began was a major theme of Mandela’s speeches at rallies in all four provinces after his release.

The ANC leader reiterated his movement’s conditions today but said he is optimistic about negotiations.

“I think Mr. De Klerk does want change, and there are men advising him who I think do want change,” he said.