COLUMN ONE : Apartheid’s ‘Sovereign’ Offspring : ‘Independent’ black homelands have become a battleground in the struggle for power in South Africa. The dispute could threaten the nation’s future.

When Andrew Manson, a white South African, and his mixed-race Danish wife moved here a decade ago, they found an oasis of racial tolerance and tranquillity. While apartheid gripped South Africa a few miles away, this tiny nation--created by apartheid’s social engineers--had a black ruler, multiracial schools, mixed neighborhoods and equal opportunities for all races.

But, oh, how the tables have turned.

While South Africa has removed the muzzles on its political opponents, Bophuthatswana (pronounced Bah-POOH-tots-wana) has cinched them tighter. South Africa allows its critics to march in the streets. Bophuthatswana arrests its critics and breaks up their meetings.

“As South Africa dropped apartheid, things just got worse here,” lamented Manson, a history professor who monitors political repression here. Now he worries that his work permit will be revoked and that, like two of his predecessors, he and his family will be “deported” back to South Africa.

Bophuthatswana, a black “country” conceived, armed and for 15 years heavily funded by South Africa, has become the latest battleground in an escalating power struggle between President Frederik W. de Klerk’s government and the African National Congress, his primary black opposition.

The ANC, which today buries 28 people killed by Ciskei homeland troops in a march last week, has targeted Bophuthatswana, home of the gambling mecca Sun City, for its next round of protests. And Bophuthatswana’s leader, Lucas Mangope, like his counterpart in Ciskei, has vowed to do whatever is necessary to stop them.

“We will match fire with fire,” promised Ephraim Keikelame, one of Mangope’s Cabinet ministers. “If they want to march, let them march in South Africa. What would you do, if the people of Iraq wanted to march in the United States?”

Of all of apartheid’s legacies, the network of independent black homelands inside South Africa’s borders, home to 10 million of the country’s 29 million blacks, has proved the most difficult to erase. And the growing dispute over those territories is a dangerous, long-term threat to the nation’s future.

When constitutional negotiations resume, as most believe they will, black and white leaders will eventually face the question: What is to become of the homelands?

The ANC considers the four independent homelands--Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei and Venda--as illegitimate offspring of apartheid, kept alive by huge handouts from Pretoria. Its efforts to have them disbanded and reincorporated into South Africa included the bloody protest march by tens of thousands last week in Ciskei, an incident that is being investigated by an independent judicial commission.

The South African government doesn’t oppose reincorporation. But it regards its creations as sovereign countries whose leaders can decide whether or not to give up independence.

The homeland rulers themselves are divided. The ANC’s main allies, Maj. Gen. Bantu Holomisa of Transkei and Col. Gabriel Ramushwana of Venda, are willing to abide by the results of a referendum on the issue.

But Lucas Mangope (pronounced Man-goh-pay), of Bophuthatswana, and Brig. Gen. Oupa Gqozo, of Ciskei, have flatly refused reincorporation. Their willingness to publicly rebuke the ANC has made them strong allies of De Klerk.

The relative tranquillity that Manson remembers in Bophuthatswana was, in fact, partly a product of South Africa’s total crackdown on political dissent. When De Klerk legalized the ANC and other anti-apartheid groups, Mangope found himself in the ANC cross-hairs and tightened his grip on the homeland. “The truth of the matter is that the ANC has targeted us because we have refused to toe the line and be cowed into submission,” Mangope wrote in a letter to the United Nations this week.

The homelands, or Bantustans, were the building blocks of grand apartheid and part of a 1961 plan by then-Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd to turn the black majority into a black minority inside South Africa. The original idea was simple enough: send millions of blacks back to their ancestral homelands, grant them homeland “citizenship” and full democratic rights, then encourage them to elect their own government.

South African authorities had hoped the scheme would appease their international critics. But it didn’t work that way, especially when the government withdrew South African citizenship from millions of blacks and forcibly moved tens of thousands from white areas into homelands.

In all, South Africa carved 10 raggedly shaped homelands from the countryside. When it was finished, 13% of the country’s land officially belonged to black homelands; 87% belonged to white South Africa.

Bophuthatswana, Ciskei, Transkei and Venda eventually accepted independence. The other six homelands became self-governing territories inside South Africa; the largest of those--Kwazulu, headed by Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi--runs its own schools, hospitals and police force.

But the homelands were doomed to fail almost from the beginning.

They generally were located on unproductive soil far from urban centers. Without an industrial base, jobs were scarce. Most homeland residents today are subsistence farmers and are substantially poorer than blacks in South Africa. Medical care and education is far below that available to blacks in South Africa.

Zach de Beer, leader of the liberal Democratic Party, says the homeland system produced “military dictators with no legitimacy but considerable firepower, financed largely by the South African government.”

And he doesn’t believe De Klerk’s claim that he no longer controls the homelands, saying, “I’m sure the government has it in its power to remove all the dictators.”

South Africa provides more than $1.5 billion in financial and military assistance to the homelands every year. And many of the homeland leaders have frittered away--or pocketed--that aid. The tiny governments, recognized by no country in the world except South Africa, have been beset by corruption and political turmoil.

Three of the four leaders of independent homelands today are South Africa-trained military men who attained power by coup d’etat.

The fourth, Mangope of Bophuthatswana, was overthrown briefly by his soldiers in 1988 but restored to power by South African commandos. Mangope was unopposed last year for his third, seven-year term. The homeland didn’t bother with an election.

Mangope, the most entrenched and defiant of all the homeland leaders, has become an ANC target because of his refusal to even consider abandoning Bophuthatswana’s independence. When South African leaders met for formal constitutional negotiations last December, Mangope was there--but he refused to be bound by the decisions. Bophuthatswana’s independence, he declared, would not be negotiated away by “foreigners.”

Bophuthatswana is part of the semiarid ancestral territory of the Batswana people. Its 3 million residents live on seven separate parcels of land, with a combined area about twice the size of New Jersey. The unfenced, 2,000-mile border with South Africa has only one immigration post; most motorists pass into and out of Bophuthatswana without seeing any sign of a border.

Bophuthatswana is the wealthiest homeland, drawing about half its revenue from platinum reserves and the gaming industry; the remainder comes from the South African government.

Mmabatho, the capital that sits on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, is a picture of prosperity. The city of 80,000 has a new shopping mall, an 80,000-seat soccer stadium, a 3,000-seat convention hall, a modern university and two luxurious hotels with casinos.

Casino gambling, topless shows and X-rated movies are illegal inside South Africa. But all the independent homelands have busy casino-hotels.

And Bophuthatswana is the undisputed king of glitz. Every year thousands of sin-seeking whites from South Africa come to Sun City, a Las Vegas-like resort that rises from an arid, uninhabited landscape about two-hours’ drive from Johannesburg. When Sun City first opened more than a decade ago, it used Bophuthatswana’s “independence” from apartheid South Africa to lure some of the world’s most famous entertainers, from Frank Sinatra to Elton John.

That ended in the mid-1980s, when artists began to realize that Bophuthatswana was a creation of apartheid.

And today, in a twist of fate, the ANC discourages foreign artists from playing Sun City--but welcomes them across the border in South Africa.

While Mangope is relaxed about gambling and race relations, the former schoolteacher now runs what is, in effect, a one-party state. (The only legal opposition party didn’t field a single candidate in recent parliamentary elections.)

The president controls the TV station and the newspapers. He can detain people without trial, ban political groups, prohibit political gatherings, and fire civil servants he considers a threat to “national security.” He has broken up dozens of ANC meetings and arrested ANC protesters.

“People are gripped by extreme fear,” said Taka Seboka, an ANC leader who teaches law at the university here. “They are afraid to express themselves. They are afraid of losing their jobs.”

In the past year, Mangope deported several teachers to South Africa and fired two hospital superintendents for their political activities. Dozens of others, including workers in state-owned companies, have been fired for supporting the ANC. “Politically, it’s like living in P. W. Botha’s South Africa,” one college teacher said, referring to an earlier Pretoria regime. “You step out of line and you’re going to get whacked.”

ANC leaders contend that Mangope, who arrives at work many days in a white, $2-million French-made helicopter, is among the most corrupt of South Africa’s homeland leaders. They say that he and his government ministers have skimmed millions from the government treasury, depositing the loot in European banks.

The government denies that. And it defends its crackdown on dissent, arguing that the ANC wants to unseat Mangope, which amounts to high treason in Bophuthatswana. “We are democrats,” said Keikelame, the government’s minister of energy affairs, mining and planning. “We only want to protect ourselves. That’s a normal thing that any country would want to do.”

ANC leaders admit they have little hope of toppling Mangope.

“We still want Mangope to be removed,” said Pascalicee Racoco, 28, a former homeland army private who was imprisoned for two years after the coup. “But I don’t think we can do it, because he’s got the support of De Klerk.”

The ANC strategy is to stage protests in the homeland that will embarrass De Klerk and force him to pressure Mangope either to resign or hold a referendum on reincorporation. “We’re saying, ‘Let us meet freely and organize our supporters, and then let the people decide,’ ” Seboka said.

But the government won’t be easily forced into a referendum.

Keikelame says the voters, by electing Mangope unopposed, have already expressed their opposition to reincorporation and their support for complete autonomy from South Africa.

Meantime, he said, “We’ve told Pretoria that they should take responsibility for their people (in the ANC). They are trying to destabilize our country.”