Next Step : On the Brink : South Africa, scarred by almost daily bloodshed, walks a dangerous line as the African National Congress plays out a risky hand in its power-sharing battle with the government.

The massacre victims have been buried, their blood washed from the shacks of this dusty township. The politicians have had their say, rallying their supporters.

And South Africa stands at a crossroads, one of the most crucial in its long history of racial strife, with negotiations suspended and the death toll from township violence still climbing.

“We’re in a very dangerous situation,” said Tom Lodge, a political studies professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and expert on the African National Congress. “We have a government, on the one hand, clearly not in control of its (security) personnel. And we have a very powerful political movement, the ANC, not in charge of its rank and file. We’re in for a very uncomfortable few weeks.”

Few in South Africa, though, doubt that the ANC will one day return to the negotiating table, perhaps within a few months. And when it does, Nelson Mandela’s risky game of political brinkmanship is likely to bring him more power than ever before to negotiate with the white-minority government of reformist President Frederik W. de Klerk.

The watershed event for the ANC was the massacre in this township, south of Johannesburg, which left more than 40 men, women and children dead in a brutal attack by 200 men from the nearby KwaMadala migrant worker hostel.

There had been massacres before. Residents of the same hostel killed 38 people at an ANC funeral vigil just 18 months ago, although seven were acquitted when frightened witnesses refused to testify. And more than 8,000 people have been killed in township violence since De Klerk launched his reform program in 1990.

But the Boipatong killings struck the country at a vulnerable moment.

The multi-party talks of the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, the chief negotiating forum, stalled in mid-May. The ANC and the government, after months of rapid progress and compromise, could not agree on a technicality--the percentage of votes that would be needed for a transitional, freely elected assembly to approve a new constitution.

The government said 75%. The ANC said 70%. And, with that gap, the two sides ran out of room for compromise.

As the Rev. Peter Morane, an official with the South African Council of Churches here, watched the televised proceedings that day, he couldn’t believe that De Klerk was unwilling to budge. And, like large numbers of blacks, he became angry.

“It gave us a question mark,” Morane said. “How genuine is this man? I no longer trust him as a person who can save this country.”

Morane was not alone. The relationship between Mandela and De Klerk had been on a long slide from the days, shortly after Mandela’s release, when each said the other was a man with whom he could do business. While blacks were growing angrier, De Klerk, heartened by his victory in a white referendum on his reform program, was brimming with confidence.

De Klerk’s own opinion polls showed that he was supported by as many as one in four of the blacks and so-called Coloreds in the country, and his party announced a drive to win more black converts. To many blacks, he appeared to be already campaigning for the first free elections in a new South Africa.

Mandela and other ANC leaders, meanwhile, were feeling the heat from increasingly militant supporters who wanted out of the negotiations.

Many blacks saw their leaders already enjoying the fruits of this new South Africa. ANC leaders were moving into fancy white neighborhoods. They were being chauffeured around town in luxury German automobiles. And the papers carried pictures of them drinking cocktails with government officials and influential white businessmen in homes that few black people could ever hope to afford.

That high life contrasted sharply with the plight of the average black person in South Africa. For them, little had changed since De Klerk began to dismantle apartheid and talk with the ANC. Random political attacks were increasing, and the police seemed to be either aiding the attackers or ignoring them. Crime was becoming endemic. Joblessness was rising, and the economy was deteriorating.

And, in the eyes of many blacks, the white minority seemed to be doing even better than before the reform process began. Whites were being welcomed on their many trips abroad. Their teams were competing in world sporting arenas. And they were waiting eagerly for the Olympic Games next month in Barcelona, Spain, where South Africa was sending its first Olympic team in 32 years--a team of 86 whites and 11 blacks in a country where blacks outnumber whites 5 to 1.

Mandela was under pressure. He tried to hold the negotiating process together by agreeing to a substantial white-minority say in the future. But he was unwilling to give away the ANC’s bottom line: majority control under a democratic system.

Then the Boipatong massacre ended De Klerk’s honeymoon with what he likes to call the “silent majority” of black South Africans. The attack appeared to be the work of Inkatha supporters from a nearby hostel. But witness after witness also spoke of police armored vehicles transporting the Boipatong attackers. Those allegations of police complicity--and De Klerk’s inability to halt township violence--struck a chord across South Africa.

Gideon Skhosana, a fast-food restaurant manager in the conservative town of Klerksdorp, west of Johannesburg, reached the same conclusion that many blacks did that day. “These guys (the government) are not changing,” he said. “They still want to cling to power.”

To be sure, the violence has not been one-sided. And it is clear that the ANC cannot completely control its supporters, either. In the days after the massacre, ANC members attacked and burned cars on highways in the Vaal Triangle, which includes Boipatong. Many of these members were recently returned exiles.

Yet calls to answer force with force were heard throughout the Vaal Triangle. Mandela’s appearance there a few days after the massacre was greeted with shouts of “Give us arms.”

And at a memorial service, the Rev. Ernest Sotsu told mourners: “This violence is perpetrated by a satanic type of government. I call on the people of the Vaal to organize defense units and go to war. You must drive out the enemy.”

Some of the ANC official outrage appeared to be manufactured, but it gave ANC leaders the excuse they needed to withdraw from frustrating talks with a white government they no longer trusted.

Inside the ANC, disagreements remain. Some leaders believe the government can be brought down through next month’s campaign of “mass action”--a program of countrywide demonstrations, worker absenteeism and rallies that has been sharply criticized by the government.

Most ANC officials, though, still believe that negotiations offer the best route to one-person, one-vote elections.

“We have to do something to get the negotiations back on track,” said Raymond Suttner, a member of the ANC’s national executive committee. “And breaking off talks was the surest way of returning to negotiations in the long run.”

So far, that strategy appears to be working. The ANC presented a long list of conditions for its return to the table but left open the possibility of a resumption of talks if the government makes substantial progress in meeting those demands.

De Klerk, only days after being driven out of Boipatong by an angry mob, strongly denied a government role in the violence. But his once-strong position in the political power struggle in South Africa has been undermined by the massacre, which cost him confidence both overseas and at home.

And the president took a surprisingly conciliatory approach to the ANC’s demands. He acknowledged the possibility that individual policemen could be involved in township violence, and he agreed to appoint two or three international experts to help investigate the violence as well as the police probe of the massacre. An independent judicial commission he appointed months ago to study violence already has begun hearings on the events in Boipatong.

De Klerk also admitted that he had failed in his promise last year to begin converting the country’s 400 single men’s hostels, home to more than 1 million men, into family units. He said $100 million had been allocated to begin the program, and he promised to take quick action.

The ANC rejected De Klerk’s response as “paltry,” but ANC officials said privately that it could form the basis of an agreement to return to the bargaining table.

“To go back tomorrow, even if the government met every demand, would cause the ANC to lose face,” said Lodge, the political analyst. “They need some public demonstrations so they can go back and say it was because of concessions or ‘mass action.’ But, at the end of the day, they will go back to the table.”