First Blacks Take Oaths as S. African Legislators : Government: New lawmakers also elect provincial premiers. Mandela attends services of various faiths.

Amid pomp and pageantry, hundreds of blacks were sworn in at new provincial legislatures around the country Saturday, taking elected office to govern alongside whites for the first time in the nation’s history.

Eight regional assemblies convened a day after last week’s liberation elections were certified as free and fair, and members of all races took the formal Oath of Solemn Affirmation in any of the nation’s 11 new official languages. As their first act, they then elected provincial premiers.

“We stand on the threshold of time, as makers of history, to realize the dreams and aspirations of all South Africans,” said Tokyo Sexwale, the new black leader of the region that includes the nation’s commercial, financial and mining centers, and its biggest municipalities, Johannesburg and Soweto.

Following the landslide win by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, seven of the new premiers, including Sexwale, are ANC members. Mandela will be formally elected as the country’s first black president by the National Assembly in Cape Town on Monday and then be inaugurated outside the Union Buildings in Pretoria on Tuesday.

Outgoing President Frederik W. de Klerk’s National Party won the Western Cape province, and Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party won in KwaZulu-Natal. The new legislature there postponed its first meeting until Wednesday.

The legislatures’ second official act will be to choose capitals of the nine provinces, as well as new provincial names in some cases. Most likely to be renamed are towns, airports, roads and public buildings named after the architects of apartheid’s now-dead racist policies.

Most analysts said the election results augur well for the new democracy and the prospects of social peace.

Seven parties, ranging from the black radical Pan-Africanist Congress on the far left to the white separatist Freedom Front on the far right, won seats in the National Assembly. That means a variety of voices will be heard as the country reinvents itself under Mandela.

More importantly, the white-led National Party and black-led Inkatha, the two major opposition parties, each captured a major province in the regional races. That gives each a strong power and patronage base from which to prepare for the next elections in 1999 and the post-Mandela era.

And the ANC was denied a two-thirds majority, the threshold necessary to rewrite the interim constitution without considering other parties. That check on unbridled ANC power reassured their political rivals as well as the business community.

Finally, the surprise win by Inkatha in KwaZulu-Natal may help defuse the raw political tensions and clan hatreds that have turned large parts of the impoverished, Zulu-dominated province into war zones that have claimed more than 10,000 lives in recent years.

ANC officials in the province continued to bitterly complain that the election was stolen through blatant vote-rigging. But reports suggest that national ANC leaders made a tactical decision to let the poll results there go unchallenged in hopes of appeasing Buthelezi and buying peace in the new South Africa.

As a result, Buthelezi’s decision to join the race a week before the polling began now appears shrewd rather than reckless: He made his point, swallowed his wounded pride and won anyway.

Now he faces another choice: whether to join Mandela’s coalition Cabinet or take his more accustomed role, outside the government, as a political gadfly and opposition leader in Parliament. Either way, Buthelezi, a man who warned last month of a “final struggle to the finish” with the ANC, is now in the ANC-led government, with a stake in its future.

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In retrospect, perhaps the most important decision during the torturous multi-party constitutional talks last year was the agreement to use proportional representation, rather than a winner-take-all approach, to create a government based on a principle of power sharing.

It meant that every established political party that joined the race had a claim in the final outcome. Only 50,000 votes, out of an electorate of 20 million, were needed to win a seat in the National Assembly and a role in the nation’s future. That created a centripetal force, bringing more and more recalcitrant parties and players into the democratic process.

Despite what seemed a biblical series of misfortunes and insurmountable hurdles in the last two months--homeland uprisings, rural massacres, urban firefights, boycotts and strikes, a major police scandal, a state of emergency, a wave of terrorist bombings--the political center not only held but steadily grew.

The dangers haven’t disappeared--the fear and distrust is too deeply embedded for that. The real challenge will come in trying to narrow the economic and social chasm between the races. But those problems remain hidden in the post-election euphoria that still pervades the land.

One obvious reason is Mandela himself. When De Klerk carped Friday about several of his more dubious choices for a Cabinet, Mandela generously agreed to reconsider. Reconciliation was more important than power, he said. This singular man then began a remarkable pilgrimage to bind the nation together.

On Friday, he was guest of honor at the Owal Mosque in Cape Town. He was welcomed with a garland of flowers and a tribute by the country’s Muslim leaders while crowds of supporters chanted outside.

On Saturday, he donned a white yarmulke and attended Orthodox Sabbath services at the Green and Sea Point Hebrew Congregation in Cape Town, where he was welcomed by Jewish leaders.

And today, he will attend an interdenominational Christian rally and Thanksgiving service with De Klerk at a soccer stadium in Soweto.

What might seem crass in another politician is spiritual history with Mandela. He attended a Methodist school as a child but later branched out. He worshiped at Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Christian services during his 27 years in prison. Overall, he only missed one Sunday service in all those years, he has said, and that was from illness.