COLUMN ONE : ANC Takes Its Message to Old Foes : The once-banned African National Congress is reaching out to white South Africans, and this seems to be reducing fears about blacks in power.

The wealthy whites were still packing away the Caesar salad and grilled sole at O’Hagan’s uptown nightclub when the bartender shut down the tap. It was only 8:30 p.m., but this was one night the manager wanted everyone sober.

Then, as ceiling fans stirred the smoky air, an elderly black man in a suit and tie took the stage usually reserved for Cy Saks, Eddie Eckstein and the other comics who send the suburbanites home smiling.

Walter Sisulu, the 78-year-old former prisoner and now domestic leader of the African National Congress, squinted into the spotlights.

The emcee said Sisulu’s appearance would be brief because he “still has a long way to go home,” and indeed he did--from the mansions of Johannesburg’s wealthiest white suburb to his four-room house in black Soweto.

Truth be told, it was also getting close to his bedtime. But Sisulu said he felt duty-bound “to come to the people of South Africa in whatever little corner they are in. They may not accept my politics, but I must come to them.”

The ANC, hated and feared by most whites in South Africa for 30 years, is taking its show onto some unfamiliar roads across the country. Men and women whose names were once identified with armed revolution are appearing in boardrooms, classrooms, radio studios and even nightclubs.

At stake is more than the ANC’s political strength. The entire peace process may hinge on the organization’s ability to convince South Africans, especially worried whites, that the once-banned ANC is not as bad as right-wing groups say it is and that the government was right to open talks with the organization.

“We are reaching out to whites,” said Ahmed Kathrada, ANC publicity secretary. “It’s slow going, but it’s better than before, when they (whites) were a solid, granite block.”

The ANC’s outreach program resembles a multilayered political campaign. Local ANC organizers talk to small, neighborhood groups in black townships and go door-to-door to recruit new members. Deputy President Nelson Mandela addresses mass rallies and leads the international fund-raising effort. And the national headquarters dispatches its best-known figures to microphones in the farthest reaches of the country.

For the most part, the white audiences have been curious and respectful, resigned to the inevitability of blacks in government and trying to make the best of it. Few are converted, but many have left with their fears about the ANC reduced.

“No matter what the ANC leaders say, the mere fact that they are appearing on public platforms and being quoted in newspapers for the first time in years has meant a massive change in the way people regard the ANC,” said Andre du Toit, a professor of political studies at the University of Cape Town. And, in many ways, he added, “they (the ANC) appear to be a pretty moderate and reasonable crowd.”

Joe Slovo, among the ANC leaders the most feared by white South Africans, certainly sounded every bit the rational politician as he answered questions for two hours last Wednesday night on a radio call-in program in Johannesburg.

Slovo said he is committed to peace in South Africa and expressed confidence in President Frederik W. de Klerk, whom he described as “a reasonable man.” He also defended the ANC’s bombing campaign, which he helped direct for years from exile in Lusaka, Zambia.

“Place yourself in the shoes of a black man back in 1960,” he told one caller. “Their leaders were detained and banned; the police fired on their demonstrations. You tell me, if you as a white man were placed in a country with those conditions, and you had any guts, you would take up a weapon. And every civilized person in the world would do the same.”

Slovo, who is white, is secretary general of the South African Communist Party. As was the case with most of the ANC leaders returning now from exile, his words and photograph were banned inside the country until five months ago.

A few days earlier, Chris Hani, current chief of staff of the ANC’s military wing, was trying to reassure business leaders in a packed conference room at the Horseshoe Motel in the Eastern Cape region, once a hotbed of black militancy.

“My party stands for a mixed economy in a multi-party state in a free and democratic South Africa,” the 47-year-old Hani told about 200 black and white executives questioning the ANC’s policy of nationalizing some industries.

Hani said the ANC plans “no wholesale nationalization” but that some state ownership would be needed “to bridge the gap between rich and poor.” Although outnumbered 5 to 1 by blacks, whites hold most of the nation’s wealth because blacks have been denied full participation in the economy.

Few business leaders have been mollified by the ANC’s tap-dancing on nationalization, but many have come to believe, as business leader Murray Hofmeyr put it after a daylong meeting with the ANC, “The good news is, gracious me, we all realize we really are in the same boat.”

The ANC also has ventured into the hallowed halls of Afrikanerdom to talk directly to the descendants of South Africa’s white settlers, the people who first instituted apartheid.

Thabo Mbeki, the ANC’s foreign affairs chief, gently teased 1,000 students who turned out to see him a few weeks ago at Stellenbosch University, the citadel of higher education for white Afrikaners and a training ground for most of the nation’s white leaders.

“I hope you don’t mind if I call you ‘Comrades,’ ” Mbeki said, eliciting laughter from the assembly.

“In the past this university was forbidden territory for some of us, but it is no longer so, and I think this reflects what is happening in the country as a whole,” added Mbeki, who has spent most of his 47 years in exile.

Now “we’d like to see this university, with all its prestige, authority and weight, count itself among the forces producing the new South Africa and to become part of the process of change.”

He spoke of white fears of the ANC as “natural and to be expected.” But he added that Stellenbosch could play an important role in telling other whites that “the thing to fear is . . . the status quo.”

Walter Sisulu ventured into another white preserve when he accepted the invitation to O’Hagan’s, in a suburb where iron grillwork and brick walls shield sprawling homes with Jaguars and Mercedes-Benzes.

The South Africans who live here, far from the overcrowded black townships, are often politically liberal, sending their children to multiracial private schools and supporting equal rights for blacks. But, being the prime beneficiaries of the economy, they strongly oppose the ANC’s support for economic sanctions and its desire to redistribute the country’s wealth.

Sisulu’s hourlong question-and-answer session here was billed as a “no-holds-barred” evening, refereed by Tony Sanderson, the host of a local cable TV talk show. “Come in and challenge him!” promotional posters said.

The new experience for the white diners started at the oak doors, where a tall, muscled black man--Sisulu’s ANC bodyguard--patted down the male patrons and searched the women’s handbags.

A thin doorman in a tuxedo watched uncomfortably. “We’re very sorry for this,” he said to each group of diners. “This is very unusual.”

But it was an unusual night in general. At precisely 9 p.m., with the dishes cleared and candlelight dancing on sober faces in the room, Sanderson opened the show with a plea.

“Please don’t enter into a slanging match,” he said, adding that Sisulu “is a moderate gentleman, and I want you to treat him with the moderation he deserves.”

Few in the audience had ever seen a member of the ANC in person before, and they gingerly took advantage of the opportunity to question this one.

“Mr. Sisulu, have you any bitterness about your 27 years in prison?” he was asked.

“There is no question of anger as far as I am concerned,” Sisulu told the patrons, most of whom supported the government that put him in jail. “I am writing it off completely. There were times I was angry at certain individuals, but I knew the future was mine.”

He later recounted his years in jail, where he was serving a life sentence for sabotage along with Mandela. Until the 1980s, he said, he and his fellow inmates were not allowed newspapers. But they followed events by collecting scraps of newspapers from the prison garbage dumps and quizzing their visitors.

“You find a way of talking to your visitors to find out what the situation is, and then you put it all together later,” he said.

Asked about the ANC’s ties with the Communist Party, Sisulu said it was “an alliance we hope to continue.” But, he added, both the ANC and the party “have their own ideologies and philosophies, and the alliance may not (continue) in the future.”

“He’s quite a skillful politician, but a bit of a rough diamond, isn’t he?” one of the diners, George Henderson, said later. “He seemed sharp enough. But we’ll have to wait and see.”

The ANC’s desire to take some control of the economy “worries a lot of us,” added Henderson, 52, who manages a factory that makes electrical appliances. “Socialism is a failed policy.”

Sisulu was asked why the ANC wanted foreign governments to maintain sanctions against Pretoria, when the sanctions had created unemployment and economic hardship among blacks and hurt the South African economy.

“We think sanctions are the shortest way to bring about a new order in South Africa,” he said. “And, in fact, it has worked. Perhaps I am here today after 27 years in jail because of sanctions.”

The evening’s cover charge, about $8, went to the ANC, prompting one man to ask Sisulu if “any part of my bill tonight (will) go to buy a bullet or a bomb for Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation),” the military wing of the ANC. Said Sisulu: The ANC will decide.

Sanderson saw his guest off with polite applause and congratulated the patrons on their civilized behavior.

“This is how it all starts,” he said. “As long as there is a dialogue existing, there is hope at the end of this dark tunnel.”

Then, with the night still young, the bar reopened for business.