SOUTH AFRICA / FACTIONAL FIGHTING : Old Animosities Split Key Leaders : Buthelezi and Mandela, prominent in opposing clans, were once friends.

Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the persistent leader of the Zulu homeland, may have tried the patience of several white government Cabinet ministers this week when he insisted on reading them a list of every time he had offered to meet with Nelson Mandela.

But, after hearing the 47 dates and events, everyone got the point.

“People are actually dying because . . . Mandela will not talk with me,” Buthelezi said.

Now, many South Africans are beginning to agree that a meeting between the Zulu chief and the African National Congress’ deputy president may be the only way of ending the factional fighting in Johannesburg townships that has caused more than 500 deaths in the last 11 days.

“A meeting between the two would not immediately end the violence and tension, but it is vitally important for both to not be seen as stumbling blocks to negotiations,” said Robert Shrire, a political scientist at the University of Cape Town. “Not only must they meet, but they must go out of their way to reach some accommodation and establish control over their constituents.”

What keeps the two from meeting?

The answer is buried in fractious black politics, royal African pride and 15 years of animosity that began when Buthelezi broke with the ANC to form his Zulu-based Inkatha movement.

Buthelezi’s offers to meet with Mandela began the day before Mandela walked free from 27 years in prison. The families of Buthelezi, a member of the Zulu royal family, and Mandela, scion of a royal Xhosa clan, were once friends. The two talked on the telephone shortly after Mandela’s release, and Mandela initially agreed to meet with Buthelezi to help end the violence in Natal province, where nearly 4,000 people have been killed in three years of clashes between their supporters. But that meeting was soon scuttled.

The ANC blames Buthelezi, saying he jumped the gun by announcing that Mandela had agreed to meet him in Taylor’s Halt, a center of Inkatha support in Natal. The ANC had preferred a neutral venue.

Mandela said later that he had underestimated the anti-Buthelezi feelings among ANC supporters in Natal, thousands of whom have lost family members and homes to Inkatha warriors. When his supporters learned of the planned meeting, Mandela admitted, “they almost throttled me.”

Since then, Mandela has started talks with the government and emerged as the country’s leading black figure, while Buthelezi, angered by his exclusion from the peace process, has grown more insistent in his demands for a meeting.

Although both men have separately called for an end to the violence, the lack of a face-to-face meeting between them has stoked the trouble, becoming a rallying cry on both sides of the front lines in Johannesburg townships.

The Zulu warriors, many of them migrant workers staying in overcrowded single men’s hostels, say they are fighting to force Mandela into a meeting with Buthelezi. ANC-supporting combatants on the other side strongly oppose such a meeting, arguing that Inkatha has been the aggressor in the current conflict.

Mandela has thus been boxed into a corner. If he doesn’t meet with Buthelezi, his image could be tarnished overseas and at home among liberal whites. But, if he agrees to a meeting, he risks losing support among his black followers.

Many of those ANC members still despise the Zulu chief for agreeing to participate in the government’s homeland system by taking the job of chief minister of KwaZulu and for his history of speaking out against ANC-inspired economic sanctions and guerrilla warfare.

Mandela said Thursday that a meeting with Buthelezi is a possibility and that the ANC has appointed a panel to look into high-level talks with Inkatha. But his schedule leaves little room for such a meeting soon. He flies to Norway today and stops in Libya and Algeria before returning on Aug. 31.

Millions of black and white South Africans hope he makes time for Buthelezi, though. As bands of Inkatha warriors raced down a Soweto street last week, a black homeowner turned from his window in exasperation to ask: “Why doesn’t the old man just meet Gatsha?”