The Refreshing Truth That Nelson Mandela Carries With Him : South Africa: The famed leader will arrive in America at a time when U.S. anti-apartheid rhetoric needs correcting to ensure progress back home.

The media feeding frenzy is under way. Nelson Mandela has begun a 45-day tour that will take him to Africa, Europe and to the United States, including Los Angeles. The calls for the leader of the African National Congress to undertake such a trip started the day after he was released from prison. Faxes and phone calls began pouring into South Africa and ANC offices. It seemed as if every university, human-rights foundation and city wanted to confer an award on Mandela. And not a few celebrities and politicians wanted to share a tight corner with one of the world’s most impressive leaders.

American booking agents estimated that the 72-year-old Mandela could command $40,000 a speech. Representatives of the New York-based Mahatma Gandhi Foundation flew to South Africa to offer the ANC leader their annual $100,000 peace prize. Jane Fonda offered a fund-raising dinner. Jesse Jackson, having briefly met Mandela in February, became a persistent caller--so persistent and loquacious, in fact, that Mandela finally stopped taking calls from him. Yet Jackson dangled the promise of millions of dollars before the cash-strapped ANC if Mandela toured America.

At first, the ANC was skeptical of such offers. South African political activists distrust American politics and its theatrics. But to an organization that needs tens of millions of dollars to repatriate at least 50,000 exiled members, most of whom are poor, and re-establish its internal operations after three decades of official banishment, the offers could not long be ignored.

Adding to the pressure is the expectation that the flow of money from various aid organizations abroad will not increase. At the most critical juncture on the road to peace in South Africa, anti-apartheid organizations are starving for cash. The Confederation of South Africa Trade Unions, the sole political voice for 2 million voteless workers, is on the verge of bankruptcy.

The irony is that black South Africans are probably closer to achieving freedom from racial prejudice, discrimination and systematic disempowerment than ever. Life is still difficult, to be sure, but the improvements are considerable. All this makes some of the anti-apartheid rhetoric still heard in America that much more misleading. It could even hinder measures for further pressure to ensure progress toward a peaceful, non-racial democracy in South Africa. For example, Randall Robinson of Washington-based TransAfrica, one of the organizations that pushed hardest for sanctions against South Africa, recently toured here. Amazingly, he told journalists that he saw no change since his last visit in 1976.

At that time, the townships were ablaze; more than 600 people would eventually die in nationwide demonstrations. Mixed marriage and interracial sex were illegal. Whites and blacks could not legally drink together; blacks were barred from white restaurants and cinemas. All blacks, by law, had to carry passes. They could not form or belong to trade unions and were excluded from certain jobs. Robinson is either blind or intransigent to believe that the South Africa of 1990 is no different from that of 1976.

What Americans will refreshingly learn from Mandela is that he and the African National Congress are not about black power, not about black rights; that the ANC is not a blacks-only organization; that its message is not that different racial groups must co-exist. Rather, Mandela and his organization are fighting for human rights, democracy and justice for all South Africans. As such, race is irrelevant.

President Frederik W. de Klerk, the other outstanding leader in South Africa, is a man unlike any other that has led the country. Mandela and the ANC leaders believe that his commitment to end apartheid is sincere.

Without doubt, De Klerk is at greater risk of assassination in South Africa than is Mandela. He is regarded as a traitor by a core of white extremists who do not shy from violence. Coup talk is rife, but De Klerk continues to pursue his policies of slowly dismantling the structures of apartheid. Last week, he lifted the country’s No. 1 symbol of repression--the state of emergency.

In today’s South Africa, most anti-apartheid groups don’t describe themselves as such anymore: They are pro-democracy. The time for protests has passed. The current imperative is to build a new society.

The head of the ANC national political education department, Raymond Suttner, put it this way: “The new South Africa begins now. Creating democracy in a nation more used to finding answers through violence--in both white and black communities--is incredibly difficult; it requires new thinking and great courage. Change is not gratefully embraced, even by those who have the most to benefit from it. It never quite lives up to expectations.”

Apartheid, of course, has not disappeared. People are still detained; repression in its many masks remains. But the nightmare is fading.

American words that distort the new, complex, fascinating South Africa will diminish the lessons to be learned from a man like Nelson Mandela, lessons about suffering, dignity and the importance of human rights.