Voters, Including Bomb Victim, Relish Making Mark on History : South Africa: Whites and blacks wait side by side at polls. It’s something many thought they would never see.

Two days before, a car bomb blew shrapnel into Zibani Dube’s chest as he walked to church here. But on Tuesday, the tall 19-year-old, in a hospital bed and barely able to move, used his uninjured right hand to cast his first vote as a free black man in South Africa.

“I feel very satisfied,” he said, wincing in pain as he spoke from beneath a plastic oxygen mask. “The government I am voting for is the one that will meet our needs. But I feel it has got to take some strong measures so we do not face these kinds of criminal actions again.”

Whom did he vote for? “That’s my secret,” Dube said, managing a smile.

It was a day that many in South Africa, and many more around the world, thought they would never see. White suburban women stood in line to vote with their black maids. Retired white businessmen were there with elderly black gardeners. All across the country, South Africa’s black, white, mixed-race and ethnic Indian citizens began choosing their country’s government--together--for the first time in 350 years.

The first of three days of balloting was set aside for special voters, such as the elderly and the ailing, as well as police and election workers. At a suburban Johannesburg school, used for dozens of whites-only elections in the apartheid past, a black policeman was the first voter through the doors.

“It actually put a lump in my throat to give him that ballot,” said Jennifer Dunn, 45, a white voting officer in the school. “It’s all very exciting. It’s incredible the enthusiasm I see, especially among the older black voters.”

At Hillbrow Hospital, which has mostly black patients and staff, men and women in hospital-issue checkered robes, some on crutches and others carrying bags of fluid for intravenous drips, stood in a line that snaked up two flights of stairs to voting booths in the hospital auditorium.

Although they had been taught how to cast their votes, many blacks appeared tentative at first. Election officials checked each voter’s identity document. The voter’s hand was put beneath an ultraviolet light to ensure that he had not already voted, then the fingers were sprayed with a dye.

Voters received a national ballot first and went to a row of small booths where they marked an X next to one of the 18 parties. That ballot was placed in a box, and the procedure was repeated for the provincial ballot.

“This is the first time in my life,” said August Renoto, 32, who was in the hospital with pneumonia. “My father--even my grandfathers--never has been allowed to vote in this country.”

Under South African law, voters cannot be asked how they voted as they leave the polls. But Renoto volunteered that he voted for the African National Congress, the likely election winner. “There is no one else but Nelson Mandela,” he said of the ANC president.

Francina Malatye, a 49-year-old black woman, said she was confident that her vote would “bring a new South Africa. It’s going to be nice from now on. We will live well, just like in America.”

Zibani Dube had been so determined to vote that he obtained his laminated temporary voter card more than a month ago. When the bomb blast killed nine and landed Dube in Hillbrow Hospital, his first request was for his voter card. His parents brought it in, placing it in a steel drawer next to his bed.

On Tuesday, election officials walked the bare halls of the hospital to find the bedridden and others unable to make the climb to the hospital auditorium. They found Dube almost alone in a 20-bed ward, surrounded by black nurses and lying beneath a long white sheet with tubes running out of his body.

“The election is going to help this country a lot,” Dube said. “Things are going to change, and there will be an atmosphere of peace and love in South Africa.”

But, he added, “if the new government is not aware of the right-wingers who threaten the system, it will cause much trouble for the country. Every South African, be he black or white, must be able to live in safety.”

If the recent spate of bombings, which killed 21 Sunday and Monday in the deadliest campaign ever waged by the far right, was designed to keep voters away from the polls, it didn’t appear to have worked Tuesday.

President Frederik W. de Klerk had sought to reassure voters that they would be safe, and at least a dozen police and army soldiers guarded most polling places. Most voters said they felt the day was too important for them to be deterred by small groups of right-wing terrorists.

“I did have a little worry,” said Christine Oxton, a 43-year-old white woman who uses a wheelchair. “But I had to be here. And this is long overdue.”

Oxton, who does volunteer work for a black education aid group, said she hoped the voting will foster big changes in race relations. “As a white South African, I actually feel cheated that I know so little about my black brothers and sisters,” she said. “That will change now. I just hope it will be the right thing for this country at the end of the day.”

Maria Loudon, a white woman from Johannesburg’s suburbs who has voted in elections for three decades, arrived at a polling station with her retired husband and a disabled son. She said she was concerned more about the country’s future than her safety.

“I’m worried about where this country is going,” she said. “And I think a lot more whites are going to vote than ever before, not because of the bombings but because we’re worried about the country.”

But she said that voting alongside blacks, who have been denied the vote by white governments in South Africa, seemed only fair. “They should have had the vote long ago,” she said. “I don’t think black people would have run the country as well, but they still should have been able to vote.”

Her husband, J. R., added: “There’s really no question who’s going to win. It will be the ANC. But the important question for us is who finishes second and third. That’s the problem.”

Many blacks, as well as whites, seemed to take the new, all-race voting in stride. Despite the racism that has been a characteristic of South Africa for years, blacks and whites do work together, though often in situations that make it clear who is the boss. And many millions of them share a desire for calm in their society.

Dorah Kubela, a black maid from Soweto, has cleaned white-owned houses and taken care of white children all her life. While visiting her daughter, who works as a maid in a white household in Johannesburg’s suburbs, she cast her ballot in a voting station used primarily by whites.

“It’s very nice that charwomen and madams are voting together,” said Kubela, 69. “But I just wish it would all be over. There is just too much trouble in this country.”