Next Step : White Liberals Take to Barricades : South Africans head off black squatters amid growing tensions over a non-racial future.

It was just by chance, really, that this idyllic, middle-class, white suburb got wind of the government’s plan to move more than 6,000 black squatters onto a tract of farmland next door.

But within hours, 500 angry homeowners had gathered in their shady park to elect an “action committee.” And by nightfall, men, women and children were posted at barricades on the roads to their suburb.

Home values immediately plummeted and banks suspended new home loans in the area. “I couldn’t sell my front gate,” lamented one homeowner.

Several hundred Bloubosrand residents, many pushing baby carriages, staged a protest march to complain that the squatters were being shoved down their throats. And people who once supported President Frederik W. de Klerk’s apartheid reform plans were having second thoughts.

“If this is the way they’re going to handle this ‘new South Africa,’ then this country is in deep trouble,” said Paul Burrows, an advertising executive and Bloubosrand resident.

The sight of this liberal white suburb, nestled in the rolling farmland north of Johannesburg, barricading itself against the arrival of a black shantytown has reverberated all across South Africa.

Whites today are worried and frightened by the rising expectations of blacks and the rapid changes in store for whites as De Klerk tries to end racial inequality in a land where it has been the status quo for decades. De Klerk’s support among whites is slipping badly, most political analysts agree. And they say the worst is yet to come.

White frustration with soaring crime rates, a lingering recession and the specter of reform has been displayed in myriad, increasingly violent ways in recent weeks.

Only days before the law-abiding folks of Bloubosrand blockaded their suburb and began a tax boycott this month, lone white men opened fire and killed 12 black strangers in three towns, simply because they were black. And a posse of enraged white farmers captured four black men suspected of killing an elderly white neighbor and beat one of the suspects to death.

De Klerk faces an important test of his support Wednesday, when voters in Potchefstroom, a mining community west of Johannesburg, go to the polls to elect a new member of Parliament. De Klerk’s ruling National Party has held the Potchefstroom seat for more than four decades, but political analysts predict that the right-wing Conservative Party candidate will prevail this time.

A defeat for the National Party in Potchefstroom would not change the balance of power in Parliament, which De Klerk’s party still controls. But it would be a setback for De Klerk’s reform program and might force the government to pay more attention to its right-wing white critics.

De Klerk and his Cabinet ministers shrug off their shrinking support among whites, saying it is part of a mid-term malaise that will evaporate long before the next scheduled white elections, in 1994. And they hope to have a new constitution, with a vote for the black majority, in place before that.

“We have argued all along that we must introduce the vital and fundamental changes as quickly as possible so there is enough time for the voters to realize that the heavens are not falling down on us as a result of these changes,” said Gerrit Viljoen, De Klerk’s minister of constitutional development.

De Klerk has sought to assuage white fears by promising a binding, white referendum on any decisions made by the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, the negotiating forum led by the government and the African National Congress, its main black opposition.

The ANC has objected to the referendum, which would give the country’s 5 million whites an effective veto over decisions affecting all of its 37 million people. But De Klerk insists he is duty-bound to take any fundamental changes in the constitution to the whites who elected him, and he says he’s confident he’ll win that referendum.

If whites vote down the constitutional changes, though, the government “will go back to the drawing board,” said Foreign Minister Roelof F. (Pik) Botha. Senior government officials acknowledge that such a defeat would create a political crisis for the National Party, which has ruled South Africa since 1948.

De Klerk’s bold plan is to negotiate a new constitution with the black majority but with built-in protection for whites and other minorities. So far, the president’s reforms have had little direct effect on white lives. Whites still control the overwhelming majority of the country’s land and its capital.

But many whites worry that De Klerk, like Mikhail S. Gorbachev in the former Soviet Union, has started a process that he can no longer control. And while ANC President Nelson Mandela has sought to reassure whites that their rights and property would be protected in any ANC-controlled government, other black leaders have promised to redistribute white-owned property and nationalize the country’s key industries.

A recent nationwide opinion poll, conducted by the government-run Human Sciences Research Council, found that only 15% of whites expect a better life in what is being called the “new South Africa.” And fewer than half of all South Africans, black as well as white, said they think there is enough goodwill among different racial groups to make a peaceful future possible.

Signs of fundamental change for whites already have appeared.

Whites-only schools have begun to open their doors to blacks, and the government admits it cannot afford to continue spending as much as it now does on white children if all are to be offered equal educational opportunity. (The state currently spends an average of five times more per pupil on whites than on blacks.) Government officials say the only alternative for whites is more private schools, meaning higher out-of-pocket expenses.

Whites also have been hit hard by the country’s recession, which many believe would only be exacerbated by the ANC’s socialist policies and state attempts to raise the standard of living for blacks. In some townships, black unemployment is 50% and an estimated 5 million blacks nationwide are homeless.

Nowhere has the clash of white rights and black expectations been more apparent than on the rural outskirts of metropolitan Johannesburg, in the 6-year-old suburb of Bloubosrand.

About 500 young families, most of them first-time home buyers, were lured here by the quiet surrounding countryside and the affordable three-bedroom homes, which run about $60,000. The overwhelming majority of residents here are middle-class, two-income families, with one or two children.

Most are political liberals, supporting De Klerk or his more liberal white opponents, and a few Indian and black families have moved into the suburb without incident. Only a few Bloubosrand residents are more conservative Afrikaners.

The trouble began two weeks ago when the provincial authority, meeting in secret, decided to relocate a settlement of 750 black families to a government-owned tract next to Bloubosrand.

The black families had been squatting illegally on private farmland in Zevenfontein, about six miles away, and working as laborers or maids in the white suburbs. Their settlement of tin and cardboard shacks has no plumbing, electricity or toilets.

The government plan was to move the squatters quickly, before local residents could object, and then build low-cost housing for them. But a Bloubosrand resident heard about the plan the day before it was to begin, and the community moved into action.

Business Day, a liberal white daily in Johannesburg, described the planned squatter resettlement as “a white South African nightmare come true. Decent people have allied themselves with the racists of the far right in their efforts to counter this perceived threat to their way of life.”

Most Bloubosrand residents sympathized with the plight of the Zevenfontein squatters.

“My heart goes out to these guys,” said Burrows, a father of two young children whose house is 500 yards from the vacant land designated for the Zevenfontein squatters. “They’re intimidated. Shot at. It’s disgusting. They’re human beings, too.”

But Burrows and his neighbors worried about a drop in their property values and an increase in crime. And they were angry that they had not been consulted by the government.

Borrowing one of the militant tactics of the black liberation struggle, Bloubosrand residents set up barricades to the suburb, vowed to not pay their taxes and marched on the city hall in Randburg, where the Transvaal provincial authorities work.

Under a hot sun, about 300 residents walked through a fancy shopping mall to the city hall, chanting slogans and carrying posters that read: “Save Our Suburb,” “No Crime-Infested Housing Slum” and “Yes to Black Neighbors--No to Low-Cost Housing.”

Government officials, including Bloubosrand’s own elected representatives, were stunned by the reaction of their constituents. And they warned that a future black government would be even less likely to accommodate the desires of white homeowners.

However, the ANC stopped short of condoning the resettlement plan. Instead, it called on the government to set up a system to identify sites for homeless people and consult property owners and all other affected groups.

The ANC said the Zevenfontein squatters represented, “in microcosm, the land and housing disaster occurring in the country.” And it blamed that disaster on the ruling National Party, which for decades had attempted to discourage blacks from moving to the cities by refusing to allow them to legally build houses in areas set aside for whites.

Last week, the Transvaal authorities backed down. They promised to find another site for the squatters by August and, in the meantime, to provide clean water, toilet facilities and garbage removal at Zevenfontein.

The barricades at Bloubosrand came down, but many remained deeply worried about the future.

“This thing was handled so incompetently,” said Burrows, who took two weeks off from his job to help fight the resettlement. “If they handle reform this way, then it’s going to swing the white vote even further to the right.”