Mandela’s Candid Talk Stuns South African Whites : Politics: The black leader scolds Afrikaners as hypocrites. His appeals to their guilt and shame apparently strike a chord.

Nelson Mandela went on the political offensive here in the heart of right-wing country Monday, administering a kind of shock therapy to a roomful of stunned white Afrikaners.

For nearly two hours, Mandela alternately mocked and scolded about 350 mostly white business and academic leaders invited by the town’s business forum to a question-and-answer session with the man expected to become South Africa’s first black president after democratic elections in April.

Time and again, Mandela angrily accused the well-dressed audience of acting as hypocrites. He said they only complained about his party’s economic proposals, especially state intervention in fiscal policies, because blacks stand to benefit for the first time, instead of just the white minority who were given special protection and privilege under apartheid.

“Whatever you say, you never complained about state intervention as long as it was a white government,” he said. “Because it helped you. But now that the next government will be black, it is anathema to you.”

And Mandela said Afrikaners hid behind their religion to justify the white supremacist policies of apartheid. The Afrikaners who devised and enforced the codified racism of apartheid insisted it was God’s will, and they made the exploitation and abuse of blacks a tenet of their Dutch Reformed Church.

“You must stand ashamed, because your community used the name of God to justify the commission of evil,” Mandela declared to the hushed room.

He grew most agitated when someone asked whether the ANC was prepared to break its longtime alliance with the country’s Communist Party. He accused the questioner of “temerity” for even suggesting it, saying the two parties had “fought against a brutal system of racial oppression” since the 1920s.

Those who opposed the system were beaten, tortured, forced into exile and killed “by a government that professes to be Christian,” he said. And 114 blacks were killed in jail in 1992 “by police who profess to be Christian.”

The Communists have “done none of these things,” he said. “You, the Christians, have done the things I have told you.”

Mandela also complained that the continued pro-apartheid broadcasting of Radio Pretoria, an unlicensed right-wing radio station outside Pretoria that has defied repeated court orders to close, showed how little had changed in South Africa.

“The whites are keeping quiet,” he said testily. “That is what is wrong with this country. You don’t speak up when it concerns your own flesh and blood. And you don’t want to use the force against whites that you do against blacks.”

Conceding that his party, the African National Congress, was “enemy No. 1” for most Afrikaners, Mandela offered the olive branch several times. But in the next breath, he declared that local whites wanted to keep the privileges they had, including preference for special training, farm credits and housing loans.

Potchefstroom, a bustling farm-belt town about a 90-minute drive southwest of Johannesburg, is known as a right-wing stronghold. It elected a member of the pro-apartheid Conservative Party to Parliament, and thousands of pistol-packing farmers converged here last May to launch their formal opposition to black rule under the umbrella group of the Afrikaner Volksfront.

A key demand of the front has been to create a Volkstaat, or autonomous white state, for Afrikaners in the post-apartheid South Africa. Although the would-be white homeland remains a right-wing dream, signs are tacked around the town welcoming visitors to the Volkstaat.

But none of the hard-core right showed up at Mandela’s meeting, and only a handful of people walked out. His candor clearly struck a chord: He won more applause at the end of his speech than he had at the beginning. And interviews with several people suggested his appeals to white guilt and shame had hit the target.

“We are ashamed as Christians,” said Elza van Biljon, a fashion designer and manufacturer. “Of course we are. It’s unreal what we’ve done in the past.”