Media : South Africa’s Right Narrows the Focus : * Extremists say their publications tell the only truth: that whites are being ‘tricked’ into a reform plan.

Pssst.

Did you know that apartheid reform is part of an international conspiracy to destroy Christian civilization in South Africa?

That discrimination against whites is one of the most pressing problems in the South African workplace?

Or that Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress plans to destroy the white Afrikaner nation?

True or not, it’s all there in black and white in the obscure, increasingly militant newspapers and magazines that circulate among the right-wing white extremists in South Africa.

Every day, the demise of apartheid is examined in staggering detail across the country in hundreds of newspaper stories, magazine articles, academic reports and essays.

But the spectrum of political thought represented on South Africa’s newsstands has narrowed since President Frederik W. de Klerk leaped leftward and launched his plan to dismantle apartheid and negotiate with the black majority.

Today, the mainstream press ranges from the fairly liberal newspapers that support De Klerk’s reforms to the very liberal publications that doubt De Klerk’s sincerity and say he should be moving faster and more decisively.

Right-wing leaders contend that the commercial press, along with the state-run broadcasting corporation, distorts the news to trick whites into going along with De Klerk’s reform plan. And they think their own, little-known publications offer the only alternative to government propaganda and the sole outlet for the unvarnished truth.

“The mainstream media in South Africa is against these (right-wing) guys--and who can blame it?” said Wim J. Booyse, director of Risk-Afrique political consultants and an expert on the right wing. “So they’ve had to create their own vehicles to propagate their views.”

The country’s 750,000 right-wing supporters are served by half a dozen Afrikaans publications, each a burning light for an increasingly isolated movement.

“They carry the message and reinforce right-wing ideas,” Booyse said. “And they have become the glue that holds the right wing together.”

The right-wing flagship is the Patriot, the organ of the Conservative Party, the government’s powerful white opponent. The weekly tabloid newspaper, with a circulation of about 50,000 and a cover price of about 40 U.S. cents, also features a four-page pullout section written in English.

The Patriot’s smaller ideological brethren include Sweepslag, or Crack of the Whip, a bimonthly tabloid published by the militant Afrikaner Resistance Movement. It has a circulation of about 500 and costs about 80 U.S. cents an issue.

The Afrikaner, a 9,000-circulation monthly, is the mouthpiece of the Herstigte Nasionale Party (Reconstituted National Party), which lost its only seat in Parliament four years ago.

One of the smallest papers is the Boerstaat Nuusbrief, or Boer State Newsletter, which sells for $6 an issue. It is sent four times a year to about 100 readers.

And right-wing readers even have a slick monthly magazine called Veg, or Fight in Afrikaans. Veg, which sells for $1.40 a copy, fancies itself the intellectual journal on the right-wing coffee table.

Each of these publications offers a hodgepodge of news, essays, poetry and photographs. Their advertisements tout, among other things, the services of plumbers and moving companies, auto parts shops and arthritis treatments and whites-only resorts.

The cover of the latest edition of the Boer State Newsletter, for example, carries the news that Melanie Human, the daughter of a “well-known personality in Boer circles,” has won a slaughtered ox in a high school competition.

But next to Melanie’s photograph is a report reassuring the faithful that De Klerk’s plan to mix the races in his new South Africa “is rejected by everyone, blacks as well as whites,” and the story predicts “an uncontrollable mess ahead.”

De Klerk, the architect of apartheid reform, is a favorite target for criticism and, sometimes, merciless ridicule by right-wing editors.

An editorial cartoon in the Afrikaner shows De Klerk as a mule, wearing blinders, pulling the wagon of South Africa--with a bag of money as his carrot. The money bag is held by Communist Party leader Joe Slovo, and the ANC’s Mandela is riding on the wagon, wearing a pirate hat.

The country’s small but growing Communist Party also takes a beating, and communism’s troubles worldwide only seem to make right-wing writers here more certain of the ideology’s sinister power.

“No one must think that the Communists will disappear of their own accord,” Veg reported recently. “The Communists are, in character, a conspiracy.”

Although De Klerk, like most whites in South Africa, is virulently anti-Communist, he is regularly linked with the Communist Party because of his willingness to negotiate with the ANC, the Communists’ longtime ally.

The Patriot calls the president “Red Fred.” And in the Boer State Newsletter, De Klerk is “Pink Frikkie,” Frikkie being a diminutive form of Frederick used with young children. (As the right-wing editors well know, De Klerk doesn’t go by his first name, anyway. Friends, family and even mainstream headline writers use his initials, F. W.)

The tabloids don’t have much time for white liberals, either.

They suggest that American liberals are part of a conspiracy to institute black rule in South Africa. And the Boer State Newsletter recently criticized De Klerk and his foreign minister for “so effusively and creepingly seeking their welfare with the Americans.”

As for home-grown liberals, Nadine Gordimer, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize for Literature, drew this prickly assessment from the Patriot:

“She is a clone of so many other South African leftists who profess to be concerned about the so-called underprivileged. She has tapped into the guilt gravy train with impeccable accuracy. . . . And like so many of her kind, she has discovered that being a left-wing white South African writer of talent is a sure-fire recipe for international acclaim.”

The Patriot added that Gordimer and other white “leftist” writers have been cushioned by the system of apartheid, “ruthlessly exploiting the liberties permitted under the very society they denigrate.”

But the bulk of the news columns and letters-to-the-editor pages are devoted to hashing out strategies for combatting De Klerk’s reforms.

Veg warns that once the ANC’s military wing is incorporated into the South African army, Mandela will have a free hand to destroy the Afrikaner. The lesson, Veg contends, comes right out of the Bible (sort of)--”Do unto others what you will have them do unto you, but do it first.”

The debates in the letters-to-the-editors pages, though, reflect deep divisions and confusion on the right. The primary demand of right-wing whites is for their own “white homeland,” but they remain confused on how and where to create such a territory, and they disagree strongly on whether the best strategy is to accept the invitation to negotiate with the government or prepare to take up arms against a future black government.

“Are we going to make war or what?” asked an exasperated letter writer, J. P. Nel, in a recent edition of the Patriot. Nel also admitted that he was confused about what would happen to blacks in the new white homeland. “Can they be forced to move out?” he asked.

Right-wing newspapers are especially concerned about the shrinking numbers of Afrikaners, the descendants of Dutch, German and French settlers who now number about 2.5 million. Afrikaners have been decimated over the years by a low birthrate, and their ethnic purity has been diluted by marriage to non-Afrikaner whites and mixed-race Coloreds.

To combat those forces, Veg columnist Ian McNish recently offered some guiding principles for young Afrikaners.

Among his suggestions was that they have many children, to carry on the “extraordinary genetic potential which you have inherited.” He also urged them to “marry for love, but only with someone of your own race.” To do otherwise, he said, “will create the basis for the destruction of an entire race.”

Times researcher Jaine Roberts in Johannesburg assisted in preparing this story.

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