COLUMN ONE : A Dream of Roots Withers : African-Americans who visit South Africa expect kinship and rejuvenation. Instead, they tend to find cultural and educational barriers that seem insurmountable.

On the morning that Lydia Hannibal’s plane landed in South Africa, she climbed down the stairway, fell to her knees and kissed the asphalt at Jan Smuts International Airport.

Some passengers thought the Los Angeles actress was being a bit theatrical.

But for Hannibal, an African-American, it was an emotional moment. She felt she was returning to her motherland, to the continent that produced her kin and from which they were taken and forced into slavery in America.

When Hannibal left a few weeks ago, though, after nine months here, she didn’t feel much like an African. She’d had her fill of what she thought were sexist black men and the blacks and whites who treated her as a foreigner and an arrogant American imperialist.

“I thought I was coming home to my roots,” she said. “But I’ve become very aware of being an American here.”

In the two years since the South African government opened its doors wide to visitors, hundreds of African-Americans have streamed into the country that has become a focus of the U.S. civil rights movement. They come to see the damage apartheid has caused, to explore business opportunities and to offer advice and aid to blacks and black-liberation leaders.

Their true roots may be farther north, in West Africa, the origin of most of America’s slaves, but many visit the southern tip of the continent expecting to feel a strong link with their African heritage and an instant kinship with fellow Africans.

But they often are surprised by the stark differences--in income, education, culture and attitude--between themselves and South African blacks.

And, like so many Americans who have dug for their ethnic roots in Europe or Asia or even the Americas, the journey back across generations has given them a new understanding of themselves and their distant cousins. Some end up feeling more American than more African. And many have left disappointed--and even angry.

One day while Hannibal was jogging in her multiracial Johannesburg neighborhood, a black South African man getting into his car playfully tried to block her way. She tried to go around, but he lunged at her, cutting her arm with his keys.

Hannibal hit him, and “then I cussed him out,” she said. Hearing her American accent, the surprised man said “Oh” and quickly drove away.

“Black men here feel it’s their right just to touch you,” Hannibal said later. “They’ve come up to me and said, ‘I want you,’ and then just grabbed me.”

To be sure, many African-Americans feel immediately at home in the generous, welcoming embrace of black South Africans. They are delighted when they are greeted in one of the local African languages by blacks who mistake them for South Africans. Once they speak, though, they are more likely to be treated as friendly foreigners--whether their skin is black or white.

“They saw me as an American black person, not as a brother but as a supporter who helped introduce the sanctions that brought the (white) government to the negotiating table,” said Reginald Holmes, a Los Angeles lawyer who is exploring reinvestment possibilities for African-Americans in South Africa.

Holmes felt comfortable with South African blacks, though he said, “I was interacting like a visitor from outer space might.”

Eddy Harris, an African-American author, traveled north to south across Africa and concluded: “Except for the color of my skin, I am not African.

“My skin is black, but my culture is not,” Harris wrote in the recently published book, “Native Stranger: A Black American’s Journey in the Heart of Africa.”

African-Americans’ dealings with white South Africans also follow a pattern. Whites often eye them with cool suspicion at first--only to become warm hosts when they learn that the black person is an American.

“They knew that I wasn’t from here before I opened my mouth,” said the actress Whoopi Goldberg, who spent six weeks in South Africa filming “Sarafina” in Soweto. “I just don’t look like people here.”

Goldberg got a few “rough looks” from whites. “But I just gave them my New York look,” she said, displaying a stern expression, “and said, ‘Good morning.’ Then they’d say, ‘Good morning.’ ”

Holmes, the Los Angeles lawyer, found it easy to talk with whites, even those with racist attitudes. “I’m almost embarrassed to say how comfortable I felt among whites,” Holmes said. “Most are well-educated, and so am I. So even if you disagree, you can have spirited and enjoyable exchanges.”

Harris thought that African-Americans have more in common with South Africa’s white Afrikaner settlers than the indigenous blacks. Although Afrikaners have more power than American blacks, both are transplanted minorities, with nowhere else to go.

The Afrikaners “will live and fight and die here, make it work or lose it all here,” Harris wrote. “The black American should make up his mind to do the same in the United States. Africa is not our home. Should the volcano erupt, we will have no place to go but the United States.”

The most common cultural clashes experienced by American visitors, white as well as black, arise from everyday encounters. Americans like to speak their mind, and they expect South Africans to do the same. But that sometimes comes across as brash and arrogant in a society where polite people generally avoid verbal conflict.

After Holmes returned to Los Angeles from South Africa, he received an angry fax from a black business contact here. Holmes had been unable to meet a black colleague of hers passing through Los Angeles, and she scolded him for having a “bad attitude.”

Holmes replied that her letter was “rude . . . and cannot serve as a basis on which to build a relationship.” Back shot the South African’s response: Holmes, she wrote, was displaying yet another example of the “black American arrogance” that blacks in South Africa have come to expect.

Holmes thinks South African blacks are suspicious of African-Americans because the Americans they meet are well-educated, well-traveled and comfortable meeting with whites.

“Most black South Africans are not particularly well-educated and not accustomed to dealing with whites as equals,” Holmes said. “And they view that comfort that black Americans feel with whites as arrogance.”

To a South African, the Americans’ self-confidence, brisk manner of speaking and can-do spirit often seem pushy.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who just happened to be in South Africa when African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela was welcomed home in 1990 after 27 years in prison, rankled many ANC leaders with his rush to share Mandela’s glory.

The day Mandela was released, Jackson climbed onto a stage reserved for the vaunted ANC leader, to the dismay of ANC officials. A few days later, Jackson showed up in front of the television cameras at Mandela’s Soweto home. But Jackson failed to appear at several rallies held in the American civil rights leader’s honor elsewhere in the country.

Although Hannibal is a warm, friendly person, her confident air quickly tagged her as an American. “People kept telling me, ‘Lydia, just calm down,’ ” she said. “Men said to me, ‘You mustn’t be so blunt. You’re in Africa now.’ And I tried to change.”

A few weeks before she left, Hannibal went to a hairdresser for a soft perm. She bit her tongue as she watched the hairdresser give her a tight perm instead. Most of her hair fell out as a result.

“In the past, I would have spoken out,” she said a few weeks later, still wearing a hat to cover the stubble on her head. “I would have said, ‘What are you doing to my hair? I want to know exactly. ‘ But I didn’t. And because of that, my hair looks like this.”

The more she tried to control her American self, the more angry she became. When she disagreed with her husband at a party one evening, other men in the group asked him: “How can you let her speak that way?”

A few South Africans even insisted that she isn’t really black. Whites who consider themselves liberals told her she is “a black person with a white soul,” apparently meaning it as a compliment. And blacks simply found her very foreign.

“Maybe we have become too Westernized,” Hannibal said. “We expect certain things, and if they’re not done, and at a certain time, we get angry. South Africans have a different attitude.”

Those differences soon become apparent to the hosts of African-Americans, if not always to the visitors themselves.

When New York Mayor David N. Dinkins arrived in Johannesburg a few months ago, he told reporters at the airport: “I’m finally home.”

But a few days later, the cultural gap became evident when the mayor and other African-Americans in his party showed up in brightly colored African shirts for a dinner with African National Congress leaders. Their ANC hosts were dressed in the more usual uniform of black leaders in Africa--dark business suits.

For Whoopi Goldberg, seeing the life that blacks have been forced to lead under white rule in South Africa made the racial prejudice that African-Americans face at home seem small by comparison. “You really have to see South Africa for yourself to understand why you have to appreciate what you have,” Goldberg said.

Hannibal’s journey of discovery in Africa had begun on a stage in Denver, where she was acting in a play about South Africa, portraying the Zulu maid of a wealthy white household.

During the play’s run, she met John Whitespunner, an Irish-born white South African who was managing a touring theater company. They fell in love, and Hannibal, the thirtyish daughter of a Sherman Oaks pastor, agreed to move to South Africa, where they were married.

Whitespunner became the manager of the Market Theater, a world-renowned showcase for anti-apartheid stage productions. But Hannibal couldn’t get work. She auditioned for dozens of parts but was turned down because of her American accent--and also, she suspects, because of a prejudice against Americans.

“One person, when he learned I was going back to the United States, said: ‘Oh, your volunteer work is done now,’ ” she recalled. That attitude angered her.

Instead of acting, she began teaching. And she worked as a speech coach on an American play, “The Meeting,” improving the accents of two South African actors portraying Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

But away from the theater, Hannibal found herself defending her home country from black South Africans who told her about the “stupid mind-set” of Americans and the scourge of “Yankee capitalism.”

“Everywhere I go, I’m constantly defending the United States, and it really makes me angry,” she said.

And when friends back home asked what South Africa is like, Hannibal had to bite her lip. “You can’t say anything negative to them because this is the ‘motherland,’ ” she said.

As she and her husband left South Africa for Los Angeles, Hannibal said she chose to remember the nice people she had met and the country’s striking physical beauty.

“I’d like to come back,” she said. “But only for a visit.”