A WORLD REPORT SPECIAL EDITION : SOUTH AFRICA: A TALE OF SIX FAMILIES : SOUTH AFRICA: FORGING A NATION : CHAPTER FOUR / The Reversal: Toward Free Elections

Late in the 1970s, an Afrikaner business colleague of Alastair Barclay, a real estate broker in Johannesburg, told him, “We either have to get apartheid right in the next 10 to 15 years, or we give it up as unworkable and accept the consequences.”

“For my Afrikaner friend, the question was not of democracy or of morality, but of pragmatic politics--could they make it work,” Barclay recalled.

“The answer was a long time in coming, but in the end it was no--apartheid could not be made to work. . . . Afrikaners could not get black people to accept endless oppression, and they themselves were not willing to play the role of oppressors forever and to pay the cost of this folly.”

Barclay, sitting back in the comfortable living room of his home in Rivonia, one of Johannesburg’s wealthy northern suburbs, recounted the conversation with a bittersweet relish.

He is ready, he said, for majority rule, for the “New South Africa,” but he knows that it will cost him, certainly in increased taxes, probably in a diminished standard of living, perhaps in reverse discrimination and quite possibly in a higher level of anxiety over the next two or three years.

“We must get on with it,” he said. “This old government has lost all legitimacy. . . . The only thing the National Party has done right in years is sound the retreat for white rule.”

But Barclay, 61, quickly distinguishes himself from “the bleeding- heart liberals whom one finds so plentifully in the northern suburbs among English-speaking whites.”

“I came to South Africa 28 years ago in part because I was to the right politically and because I could not see a future for myself in socialist Britain,” he said. “I found I was far more conservative than most of the English here. If I had the vote then, I would have voted for the Nats, apartheid and all. I felt that the races couldn’t mix, but my attitude was more paternalistic and colonial than ideological. . . .

“It took me years to change. We did not see much of the brutality of apartheid--so much of it took place in the (black) townships and rural areas. Over time, however, blacks themselves managed to make us aware of what apartheid was doing to them and their families, and I couldn’t live with that.”

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Jennifer Barclay, 52, argued that South Africa’s censored press and state-run radio and television “kept us thinking everything was fine--no problems, no worries, nothing to fear--and the Nat government would go on forever.

“There was so much we didn’t know about what the government was doing--what was going on in the (black) townships, in the prisons, in the schools, the brutality with which blacks were driven from their homes because an area was set aside for whites. We might hear that something happened, but it would be just a brief in the paper.

“If you don’t see something, you don’t think about it. Maybe we didn’t want to know, you could say, but the fact is we didn’t. . . . Once we did start to see it, on television, on reports in the overseas media, in some photographs that did get into the local press, then we could not ignore it.”

Even when the political violence of the 1980s was close, however, it left whites largely untouched. “When Alex was in flames a few years ago with gun battles up and down the streets, we couldn’t hear or see it, not even the smoke,” Alastair Barclay said, recalling the “Battle of Alexandra” in the nearby black township in February, 1986.

“We would sit here on the patio each evening, sipping our gins and listening to the radio describe fighting that might have been in Rwanda but was only two minutes away as the crow flies.”

But Jennifer Barclay’s son-in-law--both Barclays have grown children from previous marriages--was wounded in the back by shrapnel when an ANC guerrilla, disobeying orders against hitting “soft targets,” placed a bomb at Magoo’s Bar on the Durban waterfront in June, 1986, to protest declaration of a state of emergency. Three people were killed and 69 wounded.

“We got to where we are today,” Alastair Barclay said, reflecting on the sweep of the last decade, “as blacks realized they couldn’t win by revolution, no matter how many bombs they placed, and whites recognized that maintaining apartheid, and that means white rule, in the face of this increasing unrest was costing us economic growth. . . .

“From 1976, when the riots broke out in Soweto, people began to realize that this couldn’t continue, and that became clear to all during the 1980s. But what would we have instead and how to achieve it were still questions without answers for us.”

“South Africa has been very, very good to me,” Barclay said, reflecting on how he came to the country after spotting an advertisement for a property valuer and has prospered in his three decades here.

The spacious Barclay house has a swimming pool and a tennis court. Jennifer Barclay, once the women’s golf champion in South Africa, plays twice a week with friends. Their daughter, Katrina, 15, studies at a long-integrated private high school. The family has traveled widely in Europe and the United States.

“My life would probably be the envy of most American women,” Jennifer Barclay said. “We have a domestic worker who lives in, we have a gardener and, except for chauffeuring my daughter to all her teen-age things, I do as I please with my day.”

All this leaves the Barclays, as well as many other whites, with the difficult question of how much they have benefited from apartheid while opposing it. Both lay most of the blame for apartheid on the Afrikaners, particularly the National Party, which came to power in 1948, and acknowledge that rival parties were able only to badger the Nationalists into a few reforms.

Alastair Barclay extended his criticism of the National Party to its management of the economy, its bloating of the government and the widespread corruption found in recent years. “From what I know now, I can see how incompetent, dishonest, corrupt and immoral they have been,” he said.

But change will come at a cost, the Barclays acknowledge.

“We know we are going to be taxed more, maybe a lot more,” Alastair Barclay said. “We will have to pay for past sins. Black education alone will take billions, and it has to be priority. We have all been living on the profits of apartheid, to borrow a phrase, and no one can seriously object to doing what needs doing now.

“Everyone accepts, I think, that there is a moral duty to put things right as much as we can, as fast as we can. We will have to expiate in other ways too. We just don’t want to be bled white so that people will start voting with their feet and leaving.”

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One change that has surprised--and delighted--the Barclays has been the easy new relations between whites and blacks in their day-to-day contacts.

“I have a caddy, and he’s a helluva nice guy,” Jennifer Barclay said. “But before the changes started, his conversation used to be limited to ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am’ and the like. He was another black to me, I suppose, and I was another white to him. Today, I’m ‘Mrs. Barclay,’ and we talk about everything.”

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Hanging proudly from a nail in the wall in the front room of Matanga Dlamini’s home in Imbali, a black township outside Pietermaritzburg, is the framed certificate of service issued on his 1992 retirement from the Natal provincial administration--a 21-year record of promotions from laborer to cleaner to messenger to office assistant.

“My grandfather did all right, but we want to do better,” Lindiwe Sithole, 16, declared with the nonchalance of youth. “I’m going to be a doctor. . . .

“It’s not just that I want to be a doctor--I am going to be a doctor,” she said. “I want to help people, and besides that, doctors earn quite a lot. In the new South Africa, people will be able to be all they can be.”

Lindiwe’s pronouncement drew knowing smiles from her cousins packed around the room, for she is called, one cousin confided later, “the pushy one.”

But Doreen Dlamini, 57, a “tea lady” in the government’s provincial headquarters but the unquestioned matriarch of a three-generation Zulu family of more than 30 sons, daughters, grandchildren and in-laws, almost all living within a few houses of each other on the same street, nodded her head in affirmation.

“That girl is going to be somebody and probably a big somebody,” Doreen Dlamini said, looking up from her potato peeling and inclining her head toward Lindiwe. “South Africa is changing, and if she wants to be a doctor there won’t be anybody standing there saying: ‘No, girl, we don’t need any more kaffir doctors this year. You must do something else.’ Those days are over.”

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Among the numerous Dlamini cousins, a clan so close-knit they interact more like brothers and sisters, expectations are indeed high for the future and a constant theme in their conversations.

They have seen how their parents, although pushed through high school by the elder Dlaminis, failed to make it through the narrow, state-controlled funnel into good jobs.

Their lives, they say, will be different from those of their parents and grandparents.

“I’m going to be a teacher--history and geography,” said Precious Dlamini, 17. “I have the right subjects this year, I know what to take next year and the year after, I know what the teachers college requires. . . . Don’t worry, I’ve got it all lined up.”

Around the room, there was a litany of ambitions--teacher, teacher, nurse, traffic warden, secretary, lawyer, teacher, bookkeeper and, finally, almost sheepishly, policeman.

“My father was a policeman, and that is what I want to be,” said Philip Dlamini, 24. “Until now, it has not been possible. It has been too dangerous, and for the past 10 years the police were used against the people, not to protect them. I think this will change, that in the new South Africa the police will be part of the people, and then I want to join the police.”

Philip Dlamini, who finished his schooling five years ago, is now among the vast number of unemployed blacks in South Africa, picking up a few days of work a month as a casual laborer but not earning much more than enough to pay his way at home, where his late father’s pension is the main income.

“Jobs--there just are no jobs,” he said. “Never mind what you want to do, never mind what ambitions you have, there are not even jobs shoveling dirt or digging holes or collecting trash. . . . We have great hopes for Nelson Mandela as president and for the new government, that they will be able to make jobs for all.”

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The hopes are not just those of the young. Pointing to a picture of Mandela on an ANC calendar, Matanga Dlamini said: “We are expecting so much of Mandela, we have been waiting for him for so long. He was our leader when we were young, and he should have been our president long, long ago.”

Among Zulus, however, this is a highly contentious point of view because of Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s bitter rivalry with the ANC leadership.

“This is our leader, Nelson Mandela,” Matanga Dlamini said, tapping the calendar again for emphasis. “I am a Zulu, and I am proud to be a Zulu. Buthelezi is one of our chiefs, and King Goodwill Zwelithini is the king of our nation. But South Africa is a modern country with many people other than the Zulus, and Nelson Mandela will soon be its president. For the Zulus to destroy this beautiful country would be a shame.”

Imbali, a classic black township of four-room houses, many of which have been expanded to accommodate growing families, was an early battleground in the war between supporters of the ANC and Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party.

“The fighting was very intense here,” Philip Dlamini recalled. “Inkatha had some big offensives, trying to push ANC supporters out of the township. The police instigated Inkatha to invade. We in the UDF (the pro-ANC United Democratic Front) had to defend ourselves, street by street and even house by house. . . . Things are quiet now, but we are not fully in control.”

What Imbali has, according to Lindiwe, is “a small piece of peace.”

“We didn’t defeat them (Inkatha), they didn’t defeat us, we both are still here,” she said. “They hold that bit of land across the road and down the hill, we hold the rest, and that is the way it stays. Look, Inkatha is a problem, but it won’t consume my life. Politics is meant to be an endless tussle, but to achieve something.”

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Blacks have triumphed in their struggle against apartheid: Minority white rule is at an end. Yet the legacy of apartheid weighs heavily upon the whole country, whites as well as blacks, as the ANC, no longer a liberation movement but a government in waiting, assesses South Africa’s needs.

“This is not a time to rest,” said Albertina Sisulu, wife of Walter, mother of Zwelakhe and Max and one of the indomitable figures of the resistance against apartheid. “We did not come this far just to sit down on those cushiony seats at Parliament. We came to change things.”

Albertina Sisulu, 75, who ranks near the top of the ANC’s list of candidates in next week’s election, is worried--about both complacency, the feeling that political power will solve all problems, and exaggerated expectations of many blacks.

“We can’t repair the damage done by 45 years of apartheid in 45 days of democracy, as some people expect,” she said, “but we mustn’t be deterred by the size of the job.”

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She is already working on what she expects will be her portfolios in Parliament--health care, local government and housing. “Parliament will need those with experience of how people lived under apartheid,” she said at her Soweto home. “That’s where I belong.”

Known lovingly as “Ma Sisulu” and accorded the title “mother of the nation” by blacks for her years on the front lines, Albertina Sisulu credits the “Class of ‘49”--Nelson Mandela, her husband, Walter, others elected at that seminal ANC conference--with the political transformation under way here.

“The youth of that era dedicated their lives to this cause, and their dedication inspired the rest of the nation,” she said. “This is an enterprise that has been handed from one generation to another and now to another.

“For the Sisulus, it has been a family enterprise. We’ve all been in it--father, mother, all the children, even many of the grandchildren now. But families are where we are born, where we live and, yes, where we die. . . . The struggle against apartheid has been a struggle on behalf of the families of South Africa.”