SOUTH AFRICA: FORGING A NATION : SOUTH AFRICA: A TALE OF SIX FAMILIES : The Nation Rises From Apartheid

Nothing sums up apartheid more precisely, nor more painfully, than a black mother crying for her child killed in the dusty streets of a South African township in a protest against a system that was denying him a future.

Down through the years, images of white oppression and black struggle seared themselves into the world’s conscience--police firing upon black protestors, bulldozers leveling shacks that black families called home, mobs burning suspected collaborators alive, priests leading prayers for peace.

When the late Nobel Laureate Alan Paton titled his emblematic novel of South Africa “Cry the Beloved Country,” he caught all the contradictory emotions of a land where hope and doom seemed sisters.

Yet, with almost miraculous resilience, South Africa is moving toward its first free elections next week--a poll in which more than 22 million people of all races will be eligible to vote, ending nearly 350 years of white-minority rule. To tell this story of dramatic change, The Times went to the people lived it, the families from every quarter of South African society, in every corner of the country. This is their testimony.

“What was will no longer be,” said Mary Mosala, a community leader in the black Johannesburg township of Alexandra, trying to sum up the enormity of the changes. “But what will be, no one knows--that is up to us, all of us.”