NEWS ANALYSIS : Whites See Cost in Easing Apartheid : South Africa: A week of tribal killings brings realization that change may be bloody. De Klerk could be hurt politically.

A week of tribal killings that began in this small township and had taken nearly 400 black lives by Monday is eroding white confidence in apartheid reform and jolting many South Africans into realizing that the path of change is rocky and bloody.

The recent internecine violence around Johannesburg, one of the deadliest episodes in the area’s history, has its roots in political as well as tribal divisions. It has pitted Zulu supporters of Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi against the Xhosa supporters of Nelson Mandela, deputy president of the African National Congress.

Yet it is President Frederik W. de Klerk, already under fire from right-wing white opponents, who has the most to lose politically, many analysts believe.

“The average white person interprets all this as a consequence of De Klerk reforms,” said Robert Shrire, a professor of political studies at the University of Cape Town. “And, on an emotional level, it reinforces all the negative stereotypes that say black people are unfit to govern. De Klerk’s job has become very much more difficult.”

Koos van der Merwe, spokesman for the rapidly growing far-right Conservative Party, said that the government’s attempt to write one constitution for both blacks and whites is bound to fail.

“We’ve said all along: You have to separate people (by race),” Van der Merwe said after a weekend provincial party congress that drew several thousand delegates. “We can’t all be ruled by the ANC.”

If the township fighting continues, moderate whites in De Klerk’s own party--and even a few liberal whites--are likely to begin rethinking the wisdom of De Klerk’s plan to grant blacks the right to vote before the next election, in 1994.

“It’s OK to say De Klerk is on the right road, but the masses of blacks are not prepared to walk that road,” said Willem Kleynhans, a retired political science professor in Pretoria who is an expert on South Africa’s right wing. “We whites have had more than 100 years of participation in politics. These blacks are novices in the game.”

Even Frederik van zyl Slabbert, a liberal and former member of Parliament with close ties to the ANC, says that black politics needs time to adjust to new surroundings.

“Whites come from a background of cake sales and party conventions and constituency chairmen and political debates,” Van zyl Slabbert said recently. “It’s premature to accuse the ANC of being undemocratic.”

South Africa’s black majority has never had a vote in national affairs. And black politics, by and large, has always been resistance politics--sometimes violent resistance.

Many black groups have united under that common banner in recent years, temporarily burying their historical differences. Now that apartheid is fading, the differences, such as those between Buthelezi’s Inkatha and Mandela’s ANC, are reemerging. The ANC is a multitribal organization, but Mandela is a Xhosa.

The violence, which spread Monday and resulted in 22 additional deaths in Kwathema, is an outgrowth of three years of factional fighting in Natal province, Buthelezi’s home base, where chronic battles between Zulus supporting Buthelezi and Zulus supporting the ANC have claimed more than 3,000 lives since 1987.

Both Buthelezi and Mandela have called for an end to the violence, but they have yet to meet. Buthelezi, left out of the ANC’s talks with the government, wants a meeting with Mandela, but Mandela thus far has refused to see Buthelezi, whom many ANC members do not trust.

Since the current fighting erupted, there have been clashes in sections of Tokoza, Soweto and five other townships that ring Johannesburg. The death toll in Soweto alone has exceeded 110.

Dozens of people have been hacked to death. The police have confiscated truckloads of weapons, from spears to rifles, and army reinforcements have been called out.

As in Natal, the fighting near Johannesburg has involved the poorest of South Africa’s poor, people in single men’s hostels, where many rural Zulus live while seeking jobs in the cities, and in squatter camps, centers of ANC support.

The fighting started at a hostel in Tokoza, where about 10,000 men live 12 to a room, and at a squatter camp, where thousands of families live in shacks of cardboard and plastic. Hostels, squatter camps and even the tribal divisions are part of the legacy of apartheid.

The hostels and squatter camps are a result of years of government effort to discourage blacks from moving into urban areas. And the government has encouraged tribal differences by creating separate “homelands” for black ethnic groups, another policy designed to keep blacks out of the cities.

De Klerk is trying to rewrite that history with fast-moving reforms, but it is becoming plain that transition to a multiracial democracy will be especially painful in places such as Tokoza, an urban melting pot on Johannesburg’s industrial fringe.

“Working for peace has brought on this fighting,” said Dominique Billy, a truck driver and young father in Tokoza.

“And now the people are dying like flies.”