Magicians Will Need All Their Magic : Trick for Mandela, De Klerk to accommodate main minority as well as new majority

If the extraordinary closed-door talks between the government of South Africa and the nation’s black leaders that began Wednesday are to triumph in epochal reconciliation, both sides will need to demonstrate unaccustomed civility and elasticity.

How can the 71-year-old Nelson Mandela--after 27 years in jail--convert an African National Congress that employed terrorism to advance its just anti-apartheid crusade into a supple and skilled negotiating instrument? How can Frederik W. de Klerk--the South African president who fears the unleashing of raw emotions and deep forces if the talks fail--keep the political right at bay while he steers his unbeloved, heretofore racist government toward true power-sharing?

Based on South Africa’s track record, no one should want to bet the house that any good will come of all this. The odds favor failure.

But bet the long-shot anyway, for both De Klerk and Mandela already have gone too great a distance to want to retreat in failure; and both are now showing strong and steady leadership at the very time that it is most needed. On Wednesday De Klerk termed the process “irreversible.” Mandela, sometimes speaking in the white Afrikaans language, pointedly praised the president’s language.

Precisely that sense of having come to a new chapter in history will be required to overcome minority whites’ fears of retaliatory repression at the hands of the black majority in any wholly one-person, one-vote system. It will be needed also to allay black fears that negotiations will produce a rigged system where black votes count for less than white ones.

A relationship of trust--and political imagination--between Mandela and De Klerk will be crucial to success. So will agreement by both sides to negotiate a structure that offers the hope of producing a truly stable multiracial society. Such a prospect will be advanced if the negotiations look to forge a sophisticated system--perhaps even bicameral--rather than a crude one. That might well mean a powerful lower house (one-person/one-vote) and a less powerful, but nonetheless important, upper house. That kind of approach could give all fearful minorities, including whites, enough political clout to feel confident about their future in a country suddenly--though quite properly--ruled by the majority.

Radicals on both sides--to the ANC’s left and to De Klerk’s right--bitterly oppose such a compromise. That fact alone commands this formula to serious consideration.