S. Africa Faces Specter Of Mass White Exodus -- This `Chicken Run' May Be The Start Of Long-Term Flight

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - For a man whose business has never been better, Tom Ansley can't remember feeling worse.

His international moving company has been getting 100 phone inquiries a day - twice the usual number - since the assassination of black leader Chris Hani three weeks ago gave the country its worst bout of nerves in years.

"It's a sad state of affairs," said Ansley, 50, a fourth-generation South African who vows never to emigrate but says he is "desperately" afraid his grown daughters are about to.

"Some of the callers don't even want us to come out to their homes to give an estimate. They want a quote over the phone and a moving date as soon as possible. You can hear the panic in their voices."

White South Africans have a name for this sort of behavior. They call it a "chicken run," and they've seen it before, after the Sharpeville massacre in 1961, the Soweto uprising in 1976 and other turbulent milestones of the apartheid era of racial separation.

START OF LONG-TERM FLIGHT?

It is too early to tell if this latest run is a passing fright or the start of a long-term flight. It was touched off less by Hani's assassination than by the intimations of anarchy in the demonstrations among angry black youths that followed.

The specter of a mass white exodus already occupies a central place in South Africa's transition to black-majority rule. Politically, it operates as a blend of threat, bluff and bargaining

chip. Psychologically, it's a hedge, a safety valve and a profound human dilemma.

The rule in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa has been that when blacks take power, white colonizers take their leave. South Africa, however, is different. Whites arrived in the 17th century as settlers, not colonists. They've been here nearly as long as whites have been in North America.

Although they got the politics famously wrong, they built the most sophisticated economy on the subcontinent. Now, they're hoping to remain economically indispensable, even after they become politically disposable. "To whites, we say we want you to stay, we need your skills," African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela said last week, when reports of a new chicken run first surfaced.

Ansley says the vast majority will stay, probably even the majority of his callers. "You can tell they're not very proud of what they're doing, and lots of them are making quiet inquiries, just to have a backup plan in place," he said.

STILL MORE IMMIGRANTS

Except for a few of the most turbulent years, immigration has outpaced emigration in South Africa throughout the apartheid era. The official 1992 figures were 8,688 immigrants to 4,289 emigrants. Those statistics, however, miss what many experts believe is a sizable unofficial flow in both directions.

Even with all its problems, South Africa is not an easy country to leave. Stringent currency exchange laws effectively limit the assets emigrants can take out with them to about $60,000 per family. "You have to cheat your assets out, and while plenty of people do it, lots of people don't want to risk it," said Gerald Steward, a real-estate broker who says the current chicken run is mild compared those of 1961 and 1976, when the financial disincentives were not so stiff and "it seemed like every second house in the suburbs had a `For Sale' sign on it."

WHERE TO GO?

For Afrikaans speakers - about 60 percent of the white population - there's a bigger problem: Where to go? Descendants of Dutch, German and French settlers, they have created their own unique language and culture here. There is no motherland to go back to.

Yet even with all these disincentives, Ansley senses a new dynamic that could tilt the calculations toward exodus. "In the past, people left because they were afraid of political change," he said. "Now, they're leaving because they're afraid for their personal safety.

South Africa's 5 million whites are not natural candidates for sympathy. They comprise 13 percent of the population and own 85 percent of the land, control 98 percent of the wealth and have six times the average family income as the country's 28 million blacks, 3.2 million mixed-race Coloreds and nearly 1 million Asians.

Whites are frightened. The crime rate has skyrocketed in the three years since President Frederik W. de Klerk signaled the end of apartheid. So has political violence. The murder rate is 10 times that of the United States, and although most victims are black, whites seem to talk of little else. Indeed, one of the unspoken white rationales for supporting a negotiated transfer of power has been the expectation that a black government will keep the angry mob at bay more effectively than a white police state.

The aftermath of the Hani killing has cast some doubt on that premise. Mandela and other black leaders appealed for restraint following Hani's death, but black youths looted and burned their way through places like Cape Town's downtown shopping district - the symbolic heart of the good life that whites have built for themselves here.

Despite those images, Ansley is determined to stay put. He has no illusions about what the future may mean.

"Nowhere else in Africa when the blacks have taken over have they shown the slightest degree of sympathy for the whites. They will redistribute wealth as fast as they can. There will be massive taxation on people like us. The luxury of our lives will be impossible to maintain."

Still, he wants his family to stay. Like many self-made businessmen, he wants to pass along what he has built from scratch - in his case, a moving company with annual sales of $25 million - to his children. "Perhaps it is selfish, but I still think that opportunities for them here are going be greater than anywhere in the world. For them to leave is too ghastly to contemplate."