COLUMN ONE : Ending Apartheid at Work : With tensions high on all sides, South Africa cautiously moves to correct decades of economic bias against the black majority. But affirmative action is a ‘taboo’ topic, expert says.

In late 1993, with apartheid collapsing and majority rule fast approaching, nervous white executives at South Africa’s national telephone company, Telkom, launched a quiet search to see how many black managers were among their 58,000 employees.

The result was better than some had feared: They found one.

“We were, I must say, a slow-moving, fat cat, white male, Afrikaner-dominated kind of organization,” conceded Jannie Zaaiman, a senior general manager at Telkom headquarters here.

Today, Telkom has 83 black managers and an aggressive affirmative action plan to recruit, train and promote many more. The company has set targets to employ nonwhites in 20% of executive positions, 35% of middle-management jobs, 45% of supervisory slots and 70% of other positions by December, 1998.

“The point of all this is easy,” Zaaiman said. “Our complexion in the company must reflect the population we serve.” About three-fourths of South Africa’s 41 million people are black.

Meeting the goal won’t be easy. About 5,300 white Telkom workers have threatened to strike to protest the new policy. “It’s reverse discrimination,” complained A. C. van Wyk, spokesman for the notoriously right-wing Mine Workers Union, which still bars blacks from joining.

As the United States considers a broad retreat from its affirmative action policies, post-apartheid South Africa is starting to confront one of its most complex challenges: how to reform factory floors, office towers and corporate suites that still embody the worst of racial segregation and unequal opportunity.

The task is huge. The goal in the United States has been to help minorities enter the economic mainstream, but the aim here is to uplift an impoverished black majority that was deliberately denied jobs and education for decades by a white minority that now controls 90% of the wealth in Africa’s richest economy.

“The whole struggle for freedom was, in my opinion, about economic empowerment,” Labor Minister Tito Mboweni said in an interview. “And our survival as a country will depend to a large extent on affirmative action.”

But there is little consensus on how to achieve that goal, or even what affirmative action means in a race-sensitive society where until recently the color of one’s skin--or even the kinkiness of one’s hair--was the chief determinant of where and how one could live, work or study.

“There isn’t a subject more taboo in this country than talking about affirmative action in racial terms,” said John Kane-Berman, director of the South African Institute of Race Relations, a prominent Johannesburg think tank that tracks trends. Critics already have dubbed affirmative action “neo-apartheid.”

And it is not only whites who fear losing their jobs. Mixed-race workers, called Colored under apartheid, fear that they will lose out again. “Before, they weren’t white enough for many jobs,” Kane-Berman said. “Now they’re afraid they’re not black enough.”

Partly as a result of these concerns, a comprehensive national labor law, expected to pass Parliament in September, will outlaw discrimination in the workplace. But the law won’t mandate race- or gender-based affirmative action in hiring or promotions.

Indeed, no law yet requires set-asides, racial preferences or other affirmative action programs familiar to Americans.

Fearful of alienating the white business community and frightening foreign investors, the government of President Nelson Mandela is treading carefully, urging business to come up with solutions rather than imposing any of its own.

Bheki Sibiya, the head of Black Management Forum, an advocacy group for black professionals, said his members aren’t satisfied. “Our view is: Organizations have been free to implement affirmative action, and most have not,” he said. “We’re lobbying for legislation to enforce affirmative action.”

But the government is using ad-hoc means.

For example, the panel that approves more than $1 billion annually in contracts for highways, bridges and other public-sector projects in Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and Pretoria, now enforces its own informal guidelines.

“We say, ‘Before we give you a contract, what is your history on affirmative action?’ ” said Danisa Baloyi, a U.S.-educated black activist who heads the formerly all-white Gauteng Tender Board. “Each project must have an element that is empowering to the black community and uplifting small and medium-size companies.”

White companies here long have enjoyed such benefits, of course. Starting in 1911, so-called job reservation laws sanctioned systematic racial discrimination to guarantee the best-paying and easiest jobs for whites and the worst for blacks. Even when the work was the same, wages were not. Black miners, for example, earned a tenth as much as whites.

South Africa’s largest corporations are products of that system. Sanlam, for example, was founded in 1918 to provide insurance to Afrikaner farmers, the mostly conservative descendants of early Dutch settlers. It has grown to a conglomerate with $28 billion in assets and 13,800 employees.

“Sanlam was, and is, a predominantly Afrikaner-dominated company,” said Org Linde, head of human resources at corporate headquarters in Bellville, outside Cape Town. “That was why it was constituted. . . . We were like the railway, or the army or the police. It was the employer of Afrikaners.”

Sanlam decided to broaden its base after it found itself ineligible to handle a government investment portfolio from Gauteng province, which wanted to see proof that the company was not discriminatory. “That was a very clear signal,” Linde said.

In June, Linde was told to come up with an affirmative action plan. He hopes to produce a policy blueprint by early next year. “We’ve set the ball rolling,” he said.

Whatever the corporation decides, finding black professionals won’t be easy. The social engineers of apartheid decided that blacks were fit only for manual labor and other low-skill jobs. Blacks were systematically denied access to decent schools and universities.

Most universities began desegregating several years ago, although progress varies widely. But the legacy of years of discrimination is clear.

A 1991 national worker survey found 30 black engineers versus 17,840 white ones and 31 black pharmacists compared to 2,021 whites. Another study in 1994 found only 60 black chartered accountants and fewer than 20 black architects. In business, black people hold 3% of management jobs--and that’s up sharply since two years ago.

These days, managers and other skilled, experienced blacks, many trained abroad, are in feverish demand. Indeed, some have bounced from one job to another repeatedly, either for higher salaries or because of unhappiness on the job. This “pinball syndrome” has bred anger and frustration on both sides.

“White corporations feel blacks are greedy and taking advantage of the situation,” said Angus Bowmaker-Falconer, a researcher at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business. “And blacks feel companies don’t give them proper authority or respect. They’re just window dressing.”

Christina Qunta, for example, quit in May after working less than two years at Sanlam as the only black lawyer and the most senior black employee. Despite a law degree from an Australian school and eight years’ experience as a corporate lawyer, she said she was asked to translate letters and do other low-level work.

“It was disastrous,” she recalled bitterly. “They just didn’t give me work. I didn’t get invited to meetings. Their thinking was so racially conditioned that they couldn’t imagine I was even intelligent. . . . The only blacks most of these whites have ever known are their servants.”

Qunta wrote a book, “Who’s Afraid of Affirmative Action,” earlier this year, hoping to spare others the pain she endured. But she isn’t optimistic.

“I don’t know that there is a single company that really has a successful affirmative action program,” said Qunta, who has opened her own law firm. “Only a few even try.”

One that does try is Nampak, the country’s largest packaging company. Its 120 factories and businesses produce everything from beer cans to cardboard boxes. It has set a radical course for affirmative action.

In addition to hiring black college graduates, the company has recruited and trained scores of former guerrilla leaders, union officials, township activists and others with no traditional business experience.

“For us, affirmative action is not a social or a welfare thing,” said Lovemore Mbigi, an energetic Zimbabwean who was hired to run the program in 1993. “We consider it good business. By harnessing available talent, black talent, we are preparing for the future and becoming a world-class operation.”

And some of the results are startling.

In August, 1994, Velaphi Ratshefola, a 34-year-old former township lawyer, signed on as second in command at Europak, a troubled Nampak subsidiary in the seedy industrial zone of Olifantsfontein north of Johannesburg.

The plant, which makes toothpaste tubes, had lost more than $1 million the year before. Working conditions were so volatile that a white manager was locked in a restroom and beaten by his black employees. Strikes and sabotage were common.

“It was a racist company,” Ratshefola said. “Black people never had a say or a future.” His white boss, Managing Director Fred Roos, agreed: “We lost customers and sales because we were fighting each other.”

No longer. About 30 mid-level white managers who refused to adapt to the new realities have quit or been fired. The 200 or so black workers hold morning prayer meetings, often mixed with dance, chants and song. When a new machine was installed, a township medicine man cast protective spells over it. Productivity has doubled, and the plant is making a profit.

“We need to stand up on our own,” Ratshefola said as huge, roaring presses--some now decorated with baskets of flowers--stamped and spit out thousands of aluminum tubes. “We are running the government. We should take responsibility for business as well.”

Still, there is pain as well as gain when cultures clash. Ask Vince Raseroka, a black man in a white business culture.

The 35-year-old Soweto native and graduate of Fisk University in Nashville, Tenn., was hired away from an oil company six months ago to be managing director of Main Tin Manufacturers, a Nampak subsidiary with 260 employees in Industria, south of Johannesburg. He drives a new Mercedes-Benz and has moved to a posh, once-white suburb but says, “It’s a very lonely world.”

Two weeks ago, Raseroka was invited to play golf with a major client at an exclusive suburban club. As they walked off the manicured green at the end of the game, his host called a white assistant over to help Raseroka pay his caddie.

The woman clearly misunderstood. “She thought I was the caddie,” he said, shaking his head sadly. Then he shrugged. “These are the challenges of the new South Africa.”