Changing Lifestyles : S. Africa Not Rushing to Obliterate Symbols of Apartheid : Mandela’s government focuses on social change, forgoing the cosmetic surgery of removing monuments to white rule.

In a caustic comic strip, “Madam and Eve,” aliens in a flying saucer threatened to nuke South Africa because they could find no changes since their last visit to Earth.

“We’ve made lots of improvements!” Madam quickly protests.

“Such as?” the spacething asks.

“Well, we have a new president. . . . We have a new flag. . . . We have . . . uh, we have . . .”

That’s not quite fair. Nelson Mandela is no slouch in the president department; the world’s most famous prisoner has become perhaps its most acclaimed leader. And the flag, initially ridiculed for its “Y-front” design, as seen in men’s underwear, is now proudly emblazoned on ties, T-shirts and bumper stickers.

Sure, the new government has yet to deliver many new jobs, homes or other tangible benefits to South Africa’s black majority seven months after the advent of democratic rule. But it’s a Herculean task, there are limited resources, and at least the process has begun.

There has been a titanic shift in attitudes here, one that translates into a new culture in a country still struggling to shed a past tarred with the stigma of institutionalized racist oppression.

Perhaps the most obvious change is what now seems a kind of general amnesia.

“It’s difficult to find anybody now who ever supported apartheid,” said Gordon Metz, coordinator of the Mayibuye Center, a cultural institute, at the University of the Western Cape.

The interim constitution of the new South Africa mandates racial equality and respect for human rights. It is so determined to protect all citizens that it bans discrimination against both “sex” and “gender,” a legal distinction that no one seems able to explain.

Other changes, while perhaps more symbolic, seem equally dramatic. For instance, after decades of forced isolation and economic sanctions, the government will receive Queen Elizabeth of Britain, South Africa’s former colonial ruler, next spring. She’s expected to confer a knighthood on Mandela. The Rolling Stones are coming. So are thousands of bankers, tourists and diplomats; more than 100 new embassies have opened, turning provincial Pretoria into an almost cosmopolitan city.

The country now has 11 official languages. So a popular Friday night TV soap opera called “Generations” features black actors speaking Zulu, Xhosa, Tswana, Sotho and other African tongues, with subtitles for the linguistically challenged.

Political violence is down sharply, and township associations are fixing up and reoccupying homes ravaged by urban wars. One group of township warriors-turned-entrepreneurs has opened a tourist bureau in Tokoza, hoping to lure overseas visitors to the rubble-strewn streets of the infamous slum outside Johannesburg.

Johannesburg’s new MuseumAfrica has set up a display of political signs, squatters’ shacks, bars and other aspects of township life, an anthropological look at how the majority of people still live. It’s striking because other museums, and South African school books for that matter, have ignored black life and black contributions until now.

“Blacks have been alienated from museums in the past,” said the curator, Kerrie Shepherd Nkosi. “This exhibit reaffirms black history and gives recognition to that history. You must remember that, until recently, black people weren’t allowed to walk in the door.”

Still, Mandela’s attempts to reconcile the nation and to avoid a right-wing backlash have limited the reactions one might expect first after a political revolution.

For instance, tearing down or renaming icons of the past has been minimal. Except for a highway in Pretoria now called Nelson Mandela Boulevard, none of the hundreds of cities, airports, military bases, town squares or other public facilities named for the heroes of white supremacy have been renamed for Mandela or the other heroes of the liberation struggle.

Mandela has nixed attempts to erect busts or statues of him, saying the money should go instead to schools, clinics and other public programs. He has criticized those who propose destroying Afrikaner monuments, or widespread name changes of public properties, as happened after the collapse of white rule elsewhere in Africa.

Partly as a result, only one statue has fallen so far. In September, provincial officials in the Afrikaner stronghold of Bloemfontein ordered the removal of a huge statue of Hendrik F. Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid and father of the South African police state. Jubilant blacks danced on the fallen figure after it was winched from its pedestal outside the provincial offices.

The removal provoked an uproar. Armed Afrikaners marched on Bloemfontein to demand the statue be replaced on its foundation. Even Mandela criticized the move, saying greater “consultation” should have been used to avoid an impression of vindictiveness. So far the statue has not been replaced.

In June, Verwoerd’s name and brooding marble bust were removed from an office building in the Parliament complex at Pretoria. Fittingly, perhaps, dark shadows remain on the granite facade where his name once hung in brass letters.

But those are exceptions. Verwoerdburg, a wealthy Pretoria suburb, remains Verwoerdburg. And those few places that have changed names so far have mostly been given African names used by indigenous people before the whites took over. Thus residents in the wealthy province that includes both Johannesburg and Pretoria discovered in early December that they were now living in Gauteng, the Sotho word for “place of gold.”

While one white legislator complained Gauteng sounded like a disease, most agreed that it was a vast improvement on the old provincial name, “Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereenigeng,” usually simply shortened to PWV. It was, in fact, the sheer heft of that name that led to the change, not politics.

A dozen dams named for pro-apartheid leaders were also renamed, but all were given traditional African names for rivers, valleys and other local features, not for black leaders.

But the portraits of white autocrats who made white supremacy the law of the land still glower in the halls of Parliament. Nearby hang unflattering 19th-Century watercolors of minstrel-like blacks drinking, dancing and sleeping.

Nico Smit, a Parliament spokesman, said a proposal to take down the pictures was still pending before the household committee.

“The minister has decided they will consult wide and deep and all over before they do anything,” Smit said. “Everybody realizes the sensitivity of these things.”