COLUMN ONE : Land and Justice in S. Africa : Thousands of blacks were evicted from their property. Now, with neighborhood segregation laws being erased, they want it back. The ground battle has just begun.

Twenty-five years have passed, but Amina Ebrahim still remembers the day that six of apartheid’s social engineers showed up on her doorstep to kick her out of her house.

She offered them tea and comfortable chairs. “You are welcome in my family’s home,” she told them. “But I don’t want to hear what you have to say.”

Ebrahim would cling to that house for 15 years as, block by block, the vibrant, multiracial community called District Six was plowed under to make way for whites. Finally, when there were no more neighbors and no more shops, Ebrahim gave up. Days after she left, her home was flattened.

Now, the South African government, to worldwide praise, says blacks for the first time can legally live and own land anywhere they want. Within weeks, apartheid laws that segregated neighborhoods and reserved 87% of South Africa’s land for a white minority will be erased from the statute books.

But the real fight over where blacks will live is only beginning.

Tens of thousands of blacks summarily evicted by the government now want the land given back. Whites who bought that land from the government say it is theirs, fair and square. And the government, which created the conflict, now just wants everyone to let bygones be bygones.

Well-meaning South Africans are trying to head off a confrontation, some recommending that special courts or commissions decide property disputes. But the government says that redistributing land is out of the question. And some frustrated blacks already are trying to move back to their ancestral lands. For example:

* Down the coast from Cape Town is a patch of fertile farmland deeded to the Mfengu people in 1850, but from which more than 4,000 were evicted in 1977. Nineteen white farmers purchased the land from the government at a third of its value with 100% loans. The Mfengu people are going to court to get it back.

* In Natal province, about 350 landowners and tenants, who were evicted in 1975 and sent to live in a ghetto, recently moved back--in defiance of authorities--to reclaim their property and rebuild their homes. They are living in tents and shacks in the meantime.

* And 20 Barolong elders returned to their land in Transvaal province a few months ago, despite objections of white cattle ranchers who now own it. The Barolong people had been hauled away in trucks in 1971 from land they had owned for 150 years.

“For all these dispossessed people, this is more than just a question of returning lost communities,” said Aninka Claassens, a member of the African National Congress’ land commission. “It is a question of survival. And that’s why people are willing to take these risks.”

More than 3.5 million black, mixed-race and Indian people like Amina Ebrahim have been forced from their homes and off their land over the years, often at gunpoint and with meager or no compensation. Most were moved onto less productive, often overcrowded plots in the black “homelands,” far from jobs in the cities. The homelands, nominally independent states, were part of an apartheid scheme to deny the black majority South African citizenship.

Now the government says the social engineering failed. And it has decided to deal with that apartheid legacy by encouraging people to forget it. To do otherwise, it argues, would open a Pandora’s box.

“We’ve made mistakes in the past, but we cannot start the world all over again,” said Hernus Kriel, the government planning minister. “We have to have a cutoff point, and we believe that cutoff point is now. From today, there will be no discrimination.”

The government plans to replace its discriminatory laws with stiff new measures to protect white-owned land, even property taken from blacks. And it recently sent letters to white farmers, assuring them that their title deeds are safe, come what may in the new South Africa.

“The amazing thing is the arrogance,” Claassens said. “Having deprived these people of their land, the government now says, ‘Forget the past.’ They are entrenching white privilege. Apartheid is being replaced, not repealed.”

The government has its own plan to help poor blacks obtain land. More than 1 million government-owned acres near the rural black homelands will be sold at reduced rates or given to blacks, on a trial basis. Government administrators will decide who gets the land and for how long, but no criteria have yet been spelled out.

Most of the land taken from blacks in the productive South African heartland or near the cities still is owned by the government and is usually leased to white farmers. The government has no plans to return it; few blacks can afford to buy it back.

District Six, once home to 33,500 people, today is a mile-square meadow next to downtown Cape Town. A dozen churches and mosques jut from the tall prairie grass like headstones over a vast community grave.

Memorialized in poems, songs and even a musical, District Six and its residents’ long battle against the authorities came to represent all the communities snuffed out by apartheid. So bitter was the fight that most of District Six, one of Cape Town’s most expensive tracts of vacant commercial property, has never been developed.

District Six was born in 1867 between the rocky face of Table Mountain and the Atlantic Ocean. The earliest settlers were mixed-race Coloreds, descendants of early liaisons between the native Khoi and European settlers.

Like many urban, working-class neighborhoods of the day, it was filthy. Part of it was burned down to halt an outbreak of bubonic plague at the turn of the century. Later, smallpox swept through its clapboard row houses.

By 1960, though, District Six was one of the most ethnically diverse areas in Africa. Whites, Indians, mixed-race Coloreds and black Africans all were part of the melting pot. Jews lived alongside Muslims, who lived alongside Hindus, who lived alongside Christians. The streets were lined with butchers, fishmongers, sweet shops, produce stands, pharmacies and cafes.

But the area was overcrowded, indoor plumbing was rare and crime was rampant. The district was roamed by gangs, composed mostly of local movie house bouncers, well known in the community.

To the government, the district was a slum--a particularly embarrassing one because of its proximity to Cape Town, one of the most beautiful cities in all of Africa.

“It was a damn disgrace and a dangerous place to live,” Planning Minister Kriel said recently.

But Richard Rive, a mixed-race resident and playwright, described it as a community with “a mind and soul of its own.”

“Of course we all knew it was a slum. It was a ripe, raw and rotten slum. It was drab, dingy, squalid and overcrowded,” Rive said in an essay shortly before his death two years ago. “But it developed a unique attitude. It cultivated a sharp, urban inclusivity, the type which . . . black Americans have in Harlem.”

In the end, though, the physical beauty surrounding the district sealed its fate. Whites coveted the land on the mountain slopes, with the view of ships steaming into Table Bay and the short walk to downtown.

In 1966, District Six was declared “white” under the Group Areas Act, which carved South Africa into segregated residential neighborhoods. Within weeks, government officials--known by residents simply as “the group”--began visiting the homes of people like Amina Ebrahim. Eviction notices, which residents called “love letters,” followed.

Ebrahim had come to South Africa from India as a small child, and her family settled in District Six, where her father was a vegetable merchant. Ebrahim later raised her own three children in a 13-room house next door.

“We’re paying our bills,” Ebrahim told visitors from “the group.” “We’re law-abiding people. Why should we have to leave?”

The government was offering residents new accommodation on the salt flats, a 45-minute drive away. Many balked, and their bitter resistance was highly publicized. But the government persisted, evicting renters and stepping up the pressure on homeowners like Ebrahim. As residents departed, doors were quickly removed and bulldozers finished the job. People and houses steadily began to disappear.

“There was rubble, sand and stones, everywhere. Always the rubble,” Ebrahim remembers. “Our friends were decent people, and they were breaking up their homes.”

By 1981, Ebrahim’s house was one of the few left. She was divorced, living alone and increasingly worried about crime. She finally took the government’s $8,000 buyout offer and moved 10 miles away into a house rented for her by her son.

District Six was one of hundreds of communities that were moved under the residential segregation law. Executive decrees rubbed out dozens of “black spots,” sweeping away established communities where blacks actually owned the land. Some received small compensation for their houses, but none received any money for their land.

The cornerstones of apartheid may now be crumbling, but the misery created by those laws remains. The African National Congress and other anti-apartheid groups want to see apartheid reversed. They have recommended that disputed property cases be decided by an independent land court, a proposal the government calls unworkable.

“How far would we go back?” Kriel asked. “Ten years? A hundred years? Back to 1652 when we (whites) arrived here? Back further, when tribes in this country fought each other for land?”

President Frederik W. de Klerk’s big worry is his white constituency, which grows increasingly restive with the swift pace of apartheid reform. De Klerk walks a tightrope between the demands of dispossessed blacks and the demands of whites who obtained their land legally.

Despite government assurances, white farmers worry about the sanctity of their title deeds. Farmers clashed repeatedly with police earlier this year in a massive tractor procession of protest that clogged the streets of Pretoria for two days.

White liberals in Parliament have proposed a land commission as a compromise to recommend fairer compensation, though not necessarily restitution for people kicked off their land. But blacks are pessimistic. A few days ago, 14 black communities announced plans to reoccupy their land, most of which is now owned by the government and leased to white farmers.

The 16,000 acres on which the Mfengu people settled was deeded to them by the British colonial government in 1850, in grateful exchange for their support in a war with other African groups. The Mfengu settlers tamed the heavily forested land and turned it into productive agricultural land.

In 1977, then-Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha ordered the entire community moved to the homeland of Ciskei, several hundred miles away. He forbade any member of the community from ever returning and ordered the removal to begin at 3 a.m. on a spring morning two months later. The land was later sold to dairy farmers at $50 an acre, roughly a third of its market value; the buyers received full loans.

The Mfengu people petitioned the government dozens of times for the return of their land, to no avail. Last November, they asked permission to visit the area and to clean the graves of their ancestors. But the white farmers turned them down. Now they are planning legal action.

“This business about reform holds nothing for us, except that we can now legally buy back the land that was robbed from us,” said Thobile Makamba, leader of the Mfengu “exile association.”

In Natal province, the people of Roosboom went a step further. A few months ago, 41 families returned to the 4,000 acres once occupied by 11,000 people. When white farmers complained, the government obtained eviction notices, which the people ignored. Now a meeting between the settlers and the local farmers is planned.

In the western Transvaal, the Barolong people took advantage of a typing error in December to reoccupy part of their 15,000-acre ancestral lands. The local town clerk granted them permission to pull weeds and sweep their ancestors’ graves. But instead of giving them four days, as was intended, he gave them one year and four days. About 80 Barolong people took the opportunity to move back for good. Two weeks later, though, they were arrested for trespassing.

As for District Six, former residents say they know that nothing will fully restore their community. But they want the government, which still owns one-third of the district, to buy back the rest and build affordable homes for working-class people. The government hasn’t made any commitments. But a private firm recently announced plans for a low-cost housing development, which already has drawn applications from 3,000 former residents.

Amina Ebrahim, now 56, has been back to District Six only three times in the decade since she left. To see the vacant lot that was her home “still hurts,” she said, touching her chest.

She knows District Six will never again be as she remembers, but she has put her name on the list to return, just the same.

“When you love someone and they have died, you still touch their things,” she explained. “So if you love a place and are able to go back, why not? It’s where I belong.”