Next Step : In South Africa, the Latest Fight is White Against White : A new Boer War over how to save Afrikaner heritage puts the nation’s stability in peril.

The Afrikaners, proud Boers all, took up their positions on the spotless streets of this farming community at dusk.

On one side were dozens of bearded Afrikaner protesters, with swastika-like emblems on their khaki sleeves, handguns in their belts and sticks in their beefy hands. Facing them were several hundred cleanshaven and heavily armed Afrikaners in the blue uniforms of the South African police.

A protester raised his stick and lunged, and an Afrikaner melee began. Tear gas was fired, police dogs were loosed and guns cracked on both sides.

When the smoke cleared on that night in August, three Afrikaners lay dead. Dozens of others nursed dog bites and buckshot wounds. And the chasm in South Africa’s contentious white-settler nation was wider and deeper than at any moment in its long history.

That bloody attempt to break up a speech here by President Frederik W. de Klerk was the ugliest manifestation so far of the bitter differences among the 2.5 million Afrikaners who have firmly and sometimes brutally controlled this country of 37 million people for four decades.

The broedertwis , the word Afrikaners long ago coined for their fraternal quarrels, has divided friends, families, churches, schools, cultural clubs and, at its very heart, political parties. It also threatens power-sharing talks between blacks and whites as well as the stability of a future multiracial government.

“This split is very, very deep,” said Willem de Klerk, a professor at an Afrikaans-language university in Johannesburg who also is President De Klerk’s more liberal older brother.

“It’s not a matter of accent or idiom,” Willem De Klerk added. “It’s a total break in political philosophy, a total schism within Afrikanerdom about the role of the Afrikaner in the future.”

The two clear camps that have emerged in Afrikanerdom both want to preserve their heritage, but they differ sharply on how to do that.

* Leading the largest faction, supported by about 70% of Afrikaners, is President De Klerk, whose ancestors came to South Africa in the 17th Century from Holland.

De Klerk and his government believe their predecessors’ grand plan to protect Afrikaner heritage by creating independent, racially separate homelands in South Africa has failed. And he says the only option now for Afrikaner survival--and for peace--is one, multiracial South African state where power is shared and the rights of minorities, such as Afrikaners, are protected.

* Leading the smaller group is Andries Treurnicht, descendant of 17th-Century settlers from Germany and head of the right-wing Conservative Party, which has the support of about 30% of the country’s Afrikaners.

Treurnicht and his followers contend that the Afrikaners, their culture and their language will be buried in De Klerk’s “new South Africa” under the vengeful rule of blacks, who outnumber whites five to one. They say survival will be possible only in a separate Afrikaner state, and they have vowed to take up arms, if necessary, to get it.

Many black opposition leaders, though, remain deeply suspicious of Afrikaners in both camps, noting that Afrikaners are still in charge in South Africa and blacks still don’t have the vote.

Some in the African National Congress, the primary black opposition group, suspect De Klerk is using the right-wing threat to counter the demands of left-wing black groups. If De Klerk were truly committed to ending apartheid, these leaders argue, he would ignore the right wing and move more decisively to rid his security forces of its influence.

However, the riots at Ventersdorp showed many South Africans that, unless the right wing can be lured into the negotiation process, Afrikaner infighting could pose a grave threat to the country’s future.

“If some sort of arrangement is not made to protect these Afrikaners (in a future constitution), then violence becomes inevitable,” said Wim J. Booyse, a Pretoria business consultant, an Afrikaner and an expert on the right wing.

Two white men killed in Ventersdorp were rightists accidentally run over by a truck in the confusion. But the third man, 36-year-old Jacobus Conradie, was killed by white police gunfire. In a country where police have slain hundreds of black activists, Conradie was the first white political protester they had killed in nearly 70 years.

“In Ventersdorp, we proved to the world and to the people inside South Africa that we are prepared to fight and to sacrifice our lives,” declared Piet Rudolph, an official with the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, or AWB, one of many rightist organizations that support the Conservative Party.

Rudolph admits it may take some time before large numbers of Afrikaners band together to oppose De Klerk with force. But, he says, it is inevitable. “You can rest assured that the butchery at Ventersdorp will be a rallying point for the Boer people.”

It was Rudolph who touched off the riot here by charging into the police line, witnesses say. He has been charged with inciting violence.

The events at Ventersdorp frightened Afrikaners of all political stripes. Few want to see Afrikaner take up arms against Afrikaner. But at stake is nothing less than the future of a unique culture in Africa.

“The Afrikaner,” said Gene Louw, an Afrikaner and the government’s minister of home affairs, “is busy digging a hole from which he will escape with difficulty, a hole which is taking up attention and time critically necessary for discussions on the future.”

“No one has any desire to allow the present differences between Afrikaners to snowball,” Louw added. Afrikaner violence has increased sharply since De Klerk launched his reform program last year. While many attacks have been directed at blacks, in the hope of derailing the peace process, white extremists also have bombed dozens of buildings belonging to the government or De Klerk’s party.

Within weeks of the Ventersdorp incident, Afrikaners faced each other down again. Three right-wing whites jailed for planting bombs went on a lengthy hunger strike and demanded that De Klerk release them, as he has thousands of black political prisoners.

But De Klerk flatly refused and, as the men’s condition deteriorated, right-wing leaders expressed surprise that the president would allow “his own Afrikaner people” to die.

De Klerk won that round, though. The prisoners started eating again, and it emerged that, by eating food smuggled in by their wives, they had never been in serious danger anyway.

The roots that both moderate and right-wing Afrikaners are trying to protect run deeper than for any white ethnic group on the continent of Africa.

Afrikaners are the descendants of Dutch but also French Huguenots and Germans, and they were galvanized into a new nation when they landed at the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa more than three centuries ago.

Soon, their language differed so sharply from Dutch that it got a new name--Afrikaans. The Afrikaners prayed together in strict Protestant churches, and they were pressed into a cohesive group by the combined threats of the indigenous black Africans and the British colonial rulers.

A British governor began derisively calling these Afrikaners “boers,” which means farmers in Afrikaans. But the farmers promptly embraced the epithet, and it has been synonymous with Afrikaner ever since.

In 1835-36, about 10% of the Afrikaners packed their belongings and headed into the African interior to set up their own republics beyond the reach of the British throne. But the Afrikaner trekkers were defeated in the Anglo-Boer War, and they again came under British rule.

Afrikaners remained split for years between those who favored Afrikaner nationalism and others who preached reconciliation with their former enemy, Britain. The nationalists, the political ancestors of De Klerk’s National Party, finally came to power in 1948, bringing with them their scheme of “grand apartheid.”

Within a few years, most Afrikaners were together again under a single political banner, and the Afrikaner culture flourished. Afrikaans became an official language, along with English, in South Africa. And government policies were secretly hatched by the Broederbond, or Brotherhood, a think tank devoted to the survival of the Afrikaner.

By their own estimation, Afrikaners always have been strong-willed, stubborn, religious and piously loyal to their leaders.

But Alan Paton, the late author of “Cry, the Beloved Country,” was among many non-Afrikaners who found chinks in the armor.

“That many are upright and God-fearing is beyond all doubt, but their religion has what Shakespeare called a ‘worm i’ the bud,’ ” Paton wrote a decade ago. “It exalts law and order above justice, legality above compassion, stability above change.”

Apartheid, the Afrikaans word for separateness, “is the finest blend of idealism and cruelty ever devised by man,” Paton added.

It was an attempt to change apartheid that triggered the current split in Afrikanerdom, in the early 1980s. And, since De Klerk became president in 1989, those differences have grown.

“We always thought De Klerk was one of us, a conservative,” said Frank Le Roux, a Brakpan attorney and Conservative Party member of Parliament. “But he’s undermining the Afrikaner today. If he has his way, we’ll lose our punch.”

Rudolph, the Afrikaner Resistance Movement official, says De Klerk is the enemy of Afrikaners.

“We speak the same language, we look the same and we even smell the same. But we are worlds apart,” Rudolph said. “He’s absolutely an equalitarian--and a liberal for that matter. He’s no longer a member of my people.”

Afrikaner families have been torn apart by this political battle. Political discussions are banned at many Afrikaner dinner tables today. And friends have stopped speaking to each other.

“Many of our old Afrikaner friends are only memories,” said Le Roux, the Conservative Party official. “There’s no cement to bind us together anymore. And we hardly ever see them, except at funerals.”

A faction of Afrikaners left the fold of the 1-million-member Dutch Reformed Church, the religious pillar of Afrikanerdom, to form the rival Afrikaans Protestant Church three years ago. It now has 45,000 members.

And a right-wing rival to the Federation of Afrikaans Culture (FAK), the cultural umbrella of Afrikanerdom for 62 years, was formed a few years ago, with each now claiming to represent the “real Afrikaners.”

The essence of the dispute is whether Afrikaner culture can survive a South Africa in which blacks and whites both have a vote.

President De Klerk’s supporters believe a multiracial government is the last, best hope for Afrikaner survival.

“The Afrikaner is rooted in this country and a dynamic part of the country,” said the president’s brother, Willem, for years the editor of Afrikaans-language newspapers in South Africa.

“Blacks accept us as the white tribe of Africa, and I don’t think we will fall apart,” De Klerk added. “But it is the right-wing Afrikaners, with all their racism, who will destroy our people.”

Although the African National Congress and other black groups have promised to preserve the heritage and language of all minorities in South Africa, right-wing Afrikaners are not convinced.

“Nobody--not even (anti-apartheid leader) Nelson Mandela--will be able to force our language out of our bedroom,” said Rudolph, of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. “But it won’t be allowed to prosper. We’ll be like the Italians or the Portuguese. We’ll have a national day, and that will be all.”

The Afrikaner Ancestry

The original Boer commandos, who fought, and ultimately lost, the Anglo-Boer War. Below, Arthur Conan Doyle’s description of the soldiers.

Take a community of Dutchmen of the type who defended themselves for 50 years against all the power of Spain. . . . Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their country forever. . . . The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon Earth. The modern Boer (is) the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.

--Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Great Boer War,” 1900