Facing South Africa

What's the word? Tell me, Brother, have you heard from Johannesburg?

What's the word? Sister-woman, have you heard 'bout Johannesburg?

They tell me that our brothers over there are defyin' the man.

I don't know for sure because the news we get is unreliable, man.

Well, I hate it when the blood start flowin'

But I'm glad to see resistance growin'.

Somebody tell me what's the word

Tell me, Brother, have you heard from Johannesburg?

Gil Scott-Heron,

"Johannesburg"

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - Not until Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February 1990 did I even envision visiting Johannesburg. As a child of the 1960s, a campus activist in the struggle for black student rights, I regarded the South African government as worse than our own enemies at home.

For an African American, there was no choice. Why support the oppressor, a government willing to make African Americans "honorary whites" if they visited, while it enslaved and incarcerated its native-born blacks?

Johannesburg wasn't a city, but the dwelling place of apartheid. The subtle racism that I experienced daily in America was enough; its legal form would be far too much to bear.

I thought of South Africa's people when I closed my eyes in prayer. I celebrated the music of Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba, two of its exiled sons and daughters. I consoled myself with the poetry of Gil Scott-Heron, the first rapper of my generation, who got the word out in his song "Johannesburg" in 1975. If apartheid was to crumble, you'd have to suck it dry, strangle it economically. With family and friends, I turned my back on South Africa.

Meanwhile, the African landscape was changing. As several African countries gained independence, democracy inched closer to South Africa. After the Soweto uprising in 1976, when schoolchildren in South Africa's largest township rebuked their inferior education and refused to learn Afrikaans, the world press began watching more closely. In August 1985, under mounting pressure to change, President P.W. Botha instead went on the offensive with a belligerent, finger-pointing speech. The economic choke-hold began. Chase Manhattan Bank called in its loans to South Africa; within days, banks across the U.S. and Western Europe followed.

The financial crisis, coupled with Botha's Afrikaner toughness, plunged the country into severe unrest. Finally, in August 1989, Botha resigned and F.W. de Klerk became president.

Three months after assuming power, de Klerk visited Nelson Mandela in prison. On Feb. 2, 1990, in his opening speech to Parliament, de Klerk lifted the government's ban on Mandela's African National Congress party and several other anti-apartheid groups. Nine days later, Mandela was freed after 27 years in prison.

Much has happened since then. Delegates from 26 political parties finished writing a new constitution last November. Later this month, for the first time in the nation's history, black South Africans will vote on the country's next president.

Last fall I embarked with five other African-American journalists to explore and report on the South Africa that is emerging from hiding and presenting itself to the world. The trip was underwritten by the Freedom Forum, a foundation for journalism education and research, and the National Association of Black Journalists.

None of the several hundred newspaper articles I had read over the years, none of the TV images, had shown what I would find in South Africa. The media have convincingly pictured the violence. They may have largely overlooked the normalcy: day-in, day-out trade and commerce; schoolchildren taking exams; people concerned with the day's survival, the family meal, or simple entertainment and enjoyment.

What I saw and what I had imagined were distinctly different. I went to South Africa thinking all blacks lived in township shanties. But there is also a black middle class who have beautiful homes, some in the townships, some in what were strictly white enclaves before 1990. The number of Mercedes-Benzes driven by blacks was daunting. There are black doctors, lawyers, teachers and others in government and business.

In rural Natal province, I met a woman who was not only a pediatrician but also had defied ageless tradition by succeeding her husband as the village chief after he was killed in an accident. Dr. Sibongile Zungu leads the Chief Madlebe Tribal Authority and is responsible, at age 30, for the welfare of more than 60,000 people.

In many ways, South Africa works. Its telephone system is the best on the continent. The highways are well-paved, well-marked and well-maintained. Rush hour in downtown Johannesburg feels like rush hour in New York as workers pour from glass and concrete skyscrapers.

Yet throughout the country, there is also vast poverty and lack of education for the majority. Cultural traditions and isolation help perpetuate a feudal type of society; bloody clan clashes still occur. But the Third World character of much of South Africa is not necessarily backwardness; it is also a traditional life the people cherish, with strong ties of family and custom.

The simpler images I had of South Africa turned out to be untrue. What I found was a diversity, and a range of hopes and fears, that could not be easily generalized. What I brought back, instead of new generalizations, were snapshots and feelings; memories of conversations; visions of both beauty and neglect; some laughter, some tears, for a country and people undergoing the most radical change in their history.

Physically, South Africa is breathtaking. In November, the height of Southern Hemisphere spring, beautiful purple blossoms of the jacaranda trees were in bloom.

At Cape Point, where the Atlantic and Indian oceans meet, the weather was 75- and 80-degree perfect and the sun was brilliant. Rocks, sand and surf met in long, unspoiled beaches. The interior was just as spectacular, rolling terrain with lush flowering trees.

I began to understand why European explorers stole the land and sought a refuge from the dank cold of their native homes.

Westernized South Africa dates to 1652, when a Dutch East India Co. trader established a station at the Cape of Good Hope. As white settlement grew, the British and Dutch contended for the land until the modern nation was created in 1910. Black South Africans were given no part of the new democratic process.

In 1950 the Group Areas Act created the apartheid system. The country's residential areas were segregated. In short order, new laws restricted freedom of movement, required identity documents, regulated workplaces and security and formally classified people according to color.

Blacks were forced to live in "homelands" - pseudo-independent states away from the major cities - or in townships, reservation-type communities around the cities. Residential areas also were set aside for mixed-race "coloreds," primarily in Cape Province, and East Indians.

South Africa endured for nearly 40 years as a society based on separation. In the short time since apartheid was abolished, it has become apparent just how artificial that separation was. Nowhere, perhaps, have barriers come down so visibly as in Johannesburg - Joburg, as the locals refer to it.

In Joburg, the streets have become so crowded it's nearly impossible to stroll.

Competing with storekeepers, street vendors occupy prime sidewalk space, selling newspapers and magazines, tomatoes and corn, toiletries, underwear and T shirts, kitchen gadgets and souvenir trinkets. On one street corner next to the main post office, a customer gets a haircut; across the street a woman offers braids of every style. The pungent smell of a South African sausage cooked and sold on the street is everywhere.

The street vendors are new; four years ago apartheid barred blacks from the cities except to work at their jobs. Now, a mass migration is under way. Those who come are often poorly educated and lacking in skills and wind up crowding into the poorest areas of the townships. In Johannesburg, newcomers hawk their wares on the street by day and retreat to the train station at night to sleep on the ground.

You begin to understand rather quickly there's a symbiosis between the city and country, where most of South Africa's blacks still scratch a meager existence from land damaged by drought and erosion.

To understand the issues of black South Africans - from those living in squalid hostels to the proud members of Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha Freedom Party - I needed to get out of the city and go deep into the country.

After 10 days in Joburg, Phyllis Crocket, my colleague from National Public Radio, and I flew southeast to Durban to begin a trip into Natal province, home of the famed 19th-century warrior chief, Shaka Zulu.

Most black Americans traveling to South Africa are cautious and guarded when encountering whites. We were no different.

Many whites had benefited handsomely from apartheid. They lived in opulent homes, paid their live-in servants poorly and sent their children to well-equipped schools while black students struggled with little money and few textbooks.

But in any human-rights struggle, there are also those among the privileged who publicly protest or privately work within the system for change. Harriet Tubman's Underground Railroad owed its success to many white American abolitionists who helped runaway slaves. In South Africa, many whites were jailed or exiled for opposing apartheid.

Others worked from the inside, offering refuge and support to blacks. Phyllis coined an acronym - TDWP, truly decent white people - and we began to use our short-hand when we encountered those who earned the distinction.

Liz Clarke is such a person.

Born 47 years ago in the town of Eshowe to parents who had migrated from England, Clarke is the chief community development officer for the KwaZulu government. KwaZulu is a scattering of several parcels of land around Natal that make up the Zulu homeland.

In the 19th century, Shaka Zulu's rise to chief transformed the character and power of the Zulu. He perfected battle tactics that, in the late 1800s, 50 years after his death, inflicted the worst defeat - 1,800 dead - ever suffered by the British army at the hands of indigenous people.

Among the many black nurses Liz befriended over the years was Zenko Zulu Dayton, a descendant of Shaka now living in Seattle.

Liz drove Phyllis and me through the countryside of Natal, serving as guide, historian and interpreter.

As a child, she was taught that she shouldn't treat blacks differently from how she wanted to be treated.

"I challenged my mother when I was a schoolgirl because the other white children had their black maids carry their books. My mother told me the books belonged to me and I would carry them and I was not to ever ask the black woman who worked for the family to do any sort of thing."

Schooled by the Methodists, Liz left home on her 20th birthday and went to work in a mission hospital. There she found her "real true friends, the black student nurses." She became a social worker.

"I got very consumed with the realities of rural people's lives and their difficulties," Clarke said. "I had a lot of problems with South African security police beginning in the 1970s. Community development was considered subversive stuff, interfering in the domestic affairs of the Bantu (the blacks) and trying to improve them."

Clarke continues her work deep in the undeveloped areas of Natal to improve the lives of those who still rely on the river waters for drinking and washing, and who yearn for electricity.

Respectful of black African traditions and, unlike most whites, fluent in Zulu, Liz hopes those traditions remain honored as South Africa changes.

"As we scramble to unscramble tribalism and we move toward a new South Africa, I hope we don't destroy the history and leave these people in a psychological vacuum. People are made to feel wrong if they have a tribal background."

Over and over, we encountered people who knew their history and their ancestors for many generations. Deep in the countryside, many black Africans greeted Phyllis and me in Zulu. They could see our ancestral linkage and didn't realize we were foreigners until we opened our mouths - and asked Liz to translate.

One hot Saturday afternoon, as we drove on two-lane roads deep in Zululand with the car windows down to stay cool, I noticed a new, distant sound above the familiar hum of the engine. The road was straight and flanked on both sides by tall, skinny, young-growth trees. As the sound grew stronger, I knew it was singing. After another mile, we saw small figures.

Forestry workers, Liz explained, cutting the bark from eucalyptus trees.

We stopped to listen and Liz told the women we had come from far away. They were amused. They sang and we applauded, unable to say much but thank you.

They told us they worked six days a week and earned 16 rand ($4.60 U.S.) a day. Work was divided by gender: The women stripped bark and the men stacked and carried the stripped logs.

As we prepared to depart, they asked Liz how far we had come.

"They've come from America," she said.

"You may come from far away, but your ancestors are from here," responded the group's leader. All the women nodded.

We thanked them for the acknowledgment, nodded back and exclaimed, "Yea bo (Yes)!"

According to legend, King Cetshwayo lived in Eshowe, where the women and men were strictly segregated. The men didn't marry when they were young, but won the opportunity to choose wives if they performed well in battle.

After a particularly successful battle, members of a regiment of older men were invited to select from a group of unmarried virgins. When the young women heard this, they declared "No way!" - the first time in Zulu history women had said no.

There was outrage and turmoil - women couldn't resist the will of the king - and eventually a mass wedding was planned. The night before, all the young women ran away. Cetshwayo sent his soldiers after them. Many women were killed, others raped. Some committed suicide. But others escaped, organized ambushes and killed some of the soldiers - a disgraceful death at the hands of women.

Then, according to the legend, the surviving women settled in Mapumulo.

Meeting the women of Mapumulo meant traveling deep into the countryside in a four-wheel-drive van. Phyllis and I traveled with Liz and one of her development workers, Zambeli Sisbisi.

Today many women remain at home while their husbands go to the cities looking for jobs. It is a long way home again, a trip the men make only once or maybe twice a year. Many have separate families in the city that they keep secret from their rural wives.

In the country there is no electricity or running water. Cooking is done on a woodstove or an outdoor hearth. Fetching water and wood is a mainstay of daily life. Despite the difficulties, these women appreciate the beauty of their land as they forge a better life for themselves and their children.

"They were born here. Their fathers were born here, as were their forefathers," said Zambeli, translating. "They don't want to live in Johannesburg."

Tutu Ngiba, for example,lives with her 16-year-old daughter Jabu and tends six cattle while her husband works in a Johannesburg manufacturing plant.

Speaking for the women, Tutu said they wished their husbands could find employment nearer and that the area could be developed so their children would stay. That would mean improved water, electricity, better houses, health centers and schools.

But they don't wait idly. Like the women of the legend, they are activists. They have formed a collective, undertaken money-making projects and now are teaching other women what they've learned.

With their pooled labor, they constructed a building from cement blocks. They equipped it with a few essentials: a long table, a bench, some straw mats and a bed. It became a communal place to meet and conduct training. The bed gave a traveling health department worker a place to conduct exams. There was space for a classroom.

Their next venture was the garden project. They raised tomatoes and sold 10,000 rand worth (about $2,880). The garden made them realize they needed to keep out wandering cattle, and another project was born: fence making.

The women of Mapumulo had prepared a meal for us: chicken and rice washed down with bottles of warm soda. There were no ice cubes out here.

As we prepared to depart, we asked if they had any questions for us. After a few moments of silence, Tutu spoke.

"How did you lose your language?" she asked.

"You don't know the story?" we said, amazed. "Don't they know about the slave trade from Africa to America?" we asked Zambeli.

"No," said Zambeli. "The Bantu education did not include the story of the slaves from Africa."

Phyllis and I looked at one another and we began.

"Unlike you, we don't know our ancestors," Phyllis started.

"We know they lived in Africa but they were taken from their villages, placed on ships in chains and sold, like cattle," I said.

We continued our story, pausing only long enough to give Zambeli time to translate. After every translation there were deep sighs and moans.

We cried.

They cried.

We told them that the beauty of our story, if it had any, is that we know how very strong we are, how very blessed we were to have ancestors who survived that journey in the hull of a ship. After many generations, we are the living proof of their strength.

Cape Town makes it easy to understand why Jan van Riebeeck dropped anchor in 1652 and why the white settlers fought so hard to stay.

It nestles at the boundary of the Atlantic and Indian oceans, with mountains to the north and cliffs overlooking the sea. Despite a constant blustery wind which the locals say cleanses the city of sickness, it feels like a resort town: Life is much more relaxed than in Johannesburg, and striking poverty is not so evident. It could easily be an American seacoast city and has touches of summer in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston or Newport, R.I.

In Johannesburg and throughout Natal, there's no mistaking that blacks are South Africa's majority. In Cape Town, however, that is not as clear, for this is the home of South Africa's mixed-race "colored" community.

The legislative capital of South Africa, Cape Town is the country's fourth-largest city. We had traveled there to see the country through the eyes of the coloreds - and to watch Parliament approve the country's newly drafted constitution.

Unlike other African nations, where indigenous people were taken away into slavery, South Africa imported slaves. They came from other parts of the European empires as well as Africa: Indochina, Malaya, Ceylon, India, Madagascar, the Indonesian islands, Mozambique.

With few white women in the Cape, the slaves drew the forced attentions of white sailors, farmers and workers. The slaves also intermixed with the local black tribesmen, creating a new group of "colored" people.

The coloreds occupied a unique, uneasy place in South Africa's 40 years of apartheid, and have a unique view of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

In his book "The Mind of South Africa," Allister Sparks, a journalist and former editor of the Rand Daily Mail, wrote:

"All they ever wanted was to be accepted by the whites, to be admitted to their father's house. But the whites rejected them, and the pain of it was terrible. For years they hesitated to identify with black Africans, because that would have meant stepping below their station and forfeiting their half-status and half-privileges. In any case they were none too sure that the blacks would accept them any more fully than the whites. So they were caught in the middle without power and without certainty, unsure whether apartheid was an evil that kept them separated from the whites or a blessing that kept them separated from the blacks."

One long day revealed to us the contrasts that torment the South Africa of blacks and whites, and then the more subtle worries of the colored citizens.

First, we joined 82-year-old Brother Bernard of the Marist order delivering food to soup kitchens in the Cape township of Khayelitsa, a name that means "a new home," where thousands live in deplorable conditions.

From the township we went to Parliament, from austerity to opulence and arrogance. We watched as President de Klerk asked Parliament to approve the new constitution. As debate began, I looked onto the floor of the chamber. There were whites and a few Indians, but not one black face. This, I thought to myself, will be the last time this chamber is so devoid of color. It was to be Parliament's last sitting before this month's elections.

Finally, we visited with Vince Colbe, a retired librarian who talked to us of life under apartheid and the complexities of being "colored."

We had heard from other coloreds how apartheid split families as many who chose to pass for white walked away from loved ones, never to be seen or heard from again. Once the change was made, the enforcers of apartheid didn't allow you to reconnect with or contact your family.

Skin color did not define one's "colored" status; lineage did. Coloreds range from those who appear white to those who are as dark as black Africans.

"The whole concept of the colored community is something that was fostered on everyone," said Colbe. "There was a time when you couldn't get a house or a job or get into school unless you said you were a colored. You had to acknowledge your ethnic classification by this racist state.

"With British colonialism and European rule, European-ness became important, and there was this aspiration toward European descent. My grandmother suffered from it. I only have my white ancestors up there on the wall. They didn't think it was worth keeping the photographs of those who weren't white. This was your passport to a better deal. If you married well, et cetera, in racial terms you had a chance of a better future.

"You find this whole group of people who came into existence with the consciousness of them being someone else's reject."

"I'm a Cape chauvinist," he went on. "This is our homeland, this is our roots and we want full citizenship, not as anybody's reject, not to aspire to anybody's value. I don't have to learn Xhosa or Zulu. I don't have to paint myself white to be accepted. I want to be accepted for being a citizen of this part of the world."

It will take time, he said.

"The scaffolding has been taken away, but society is still there," Colbe added. "You still have colored suburbs like this one, you still have colored-school education departments, whole churches, social life. You still have child friends, school friends, your family relationships, and this perpetuates the reality of this apartheid-articulated society.

"A lot of colored people could be anybody - could be a Muslim, could be a Christian, could be a black face, brown face, English-speaking, Afrikaans-speaking, anybody. There's no common characteristic which creates this class the way the Zulus or the Jews or the Afrikaners were created. I love it, it's a class I love because it's so cosmopolitan, so international, it's so race-free, it made this city great.

"It's always been that ignored, forgotten element of people who rejected racism, who tried to live a nonracial life, who were banned by law, even by their own families. There's a whole history of non-racism in this place that could be acknowledged and which could be a germ to flourish for the future. . ."

We returned to Johannesburg and one evening I met Brian and May Abrahams at a trendy Italian restaurant, La Broca. I knew almost immediately they were members of the group Phyllis had dubbed TDWP - truly decent white people.

For more than 20 years, through the most tense period in South Africa's history, Brian and Jerry Dlepu, a black golfer, defied South African law and maintained a close friendship.

Over laughter and good food, Jerry and Brian mused and reminisced. They talked of evading police during the grim period of apartheid, when blacks were not allowed in the homes of whites unless they were employed there.

"We looked at each other as people and not our color, and we became friends," Brian said. "The common bond was bigger than the color difference. The bond which brought us together was mischief. We'd go gallivanting to Swaziland. We couldn't hang out together in Johannesburg, so we used to go to Swaziland, which is a black kingdom. Every second weekend, we'd leave Friday afternoon and go to Swaziland and be ourselves.

"It was very difficult here, I'd be honest. Jerry even lived with me at one stage, which was illegal. If I was caught, I would have probably been penalized a 10,000 rand ($2,880) fine, and he would have been jailed."

Brian Abrahams is a third-generation South African. His grandparents were Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe during the early years of this century. His wife, May, is English.

May operates a thriving mineral-water business. Brian is a representative for several clothing manufacturers. They live in an older, upscale neighborhood, Observatory, where they raised two children now in their early 20s. They are concerned about the future of South Africa for their children and themselves.

Asked what he'd like Americans to know about white South Africans, Brian said, "I'd like them to know we're not all racist swine, and some of us are just normal heathens."

In the last three years, Brian has seen "just about everything change in South Africa: the migration of blacks to the city; affluent blacks moving into the white suburbs; black children going to the schools where they weren't allowed before and getting a real education, not the so-called Bantu education."

The biggest change, he finds, is the exposure of whites to blacks and, most strikingly, the exposure of whites to crime and violence.

"I'd say 80 to 90 percent of the white guys walking around are armed, carrying a gun or something, through necessity or whatever. The chances of you being attacked are high, one in 28 at the moment is one statistic," said Brian, quietly unzipping a brown clutch purse to reveal a revolver.

Many whites are leaving Johannesburg.

"My class at school, 80 percent of them have emigrated to the United States, Canada and Australia," Brian said. "They're all professional men . . . they will never come back."

Why hasn't he fled?

"I think you get Africa in your blood. It's a romance. You can't explain. If you're born here, you live with the freedom of the countryside and the weather and sun and the rivers and wildlife and outdoors. I'm an African and it's very hard to leave."

Brian said he's comfortable with majority rule by blacks.

"I think Mandela stands for the right things," he said. "If the people on the ground just listen and obey . . . otherwise there'll be anarchy.

"If it happens like Angola . . . I've had friends who lived in Angola and said big problems could never happen in Angola. That was 15 years ago. Today Angola is a wasteland.

"This could be a Sarajevo if we all go in different directions. Beirut would look like a picnic.

"On the other hand, this could be the United States of Africa. We could be the role model for the rest of the world because we have the infrastructure, the wealth, we have everything here."

It is not far in miles from the Abrahams' comfortable Observatory neighborhood to the black townships around Johannesburg. The townships themselves are diverse. There are vast poverty and neglect, but also more affluent black suburbs that mirror their white middle-class counterparts - right down to high fences, security systems and grates across the windows.

Within the townships, however, are areas called "hostels" that might as well be another planet. Here blacks have crowded into squalid communities of what was intended to be temporary housing but has become permanent.

The hostels were once where rural men lived while working in the nearby city. Now migration to the hostels has mushroomed, and it includes women and children.

Hostel areas may cover many blocks. A single brick structure may be a block long, with openings for windows and, perhaps, glass. The less fortunate build their dwellings of corrugated tin, cardboard and wood in squatters' camps. Many families may live in one room; some attempt to garden in the hard, rocky earth.

A government report painted part of the picture:

"The buildings in most of the hostels were in need of repairs. Many of the window panes have been shot out . . . In some cases corrugated iron is being used in the place of window panes . . .

There were hundreds of unemployed men milling around with nothing to do.

The toilets in the hostels are linked to a water-borne sewage system. The lack of water and the overload on the system because of the numbers of people have created a very serious health hazard as well as being very unpleasant environmentally.

There is no bus service within the immediate vicinity of the hostels and commuters come under fire if they try to reach bus terminals. A limited number of minibus taxis . . . are often attacked."

If their living conditions weren't difficult enough, the hostels have been scenes of virtual civil warfare. Hostel dwellers from many homelands fight over political and clan differences. And all are considered enemies by residents of the surrounding townships, generally supporters of the African National Congress who suspect their hostel neighbors of loyalties to the rival Inkatha Freedom Party.

Several days a week, Davin Bremner takes his life in his hands and goes into the hostels, helping resolve conflicts.

I caught up with Bremner on my final working day in Johannesburg. He was eager to take Phyllis and me into the Meadowlands, a section of Soweto where a major conflict had been quelled between township residents and hostel dwellers.

The conflict had been over taxi service, a lifeline for residents of both communities. Lacking other public transportation, they take the taxis to jobs, markets and health services.

Bremner's strategy of conflict resolution began by avoiding blame. Instead, Inkatha and ANC members came to a room, armed with guns, representing the hostel and township, to tell the history of the hostel as they knew it.

Out of that grew some understanding. A peace accord was struck and a taxi association was created to monitor and ensure service during the morning and evening commuting hours for everyone.

"I think very slowly people are learning there are other ways they can solve their problems," Bremner said. "These taxi drivers are very proud of what they've learned and they'll say, `Two years ago I thought the only way to solve my problems was with a gun.'

"They feel good about themselves and they're making a significant impact on their community. A place that was ravaged a year and a half ago is now stable. People are living a more normal life."

Bremner, a Seattle native, has been in South Africa three years.

We toured the hostel with members of the taxi association and saw trash strewn about, houses burned, three communal toilets and one water tap for 300 families.

"One cannot expect drastic changes after the election," said Nelson Msomi, chief of Meadowlands Hostel, Zone 11. "We must be realistic. Any future government will face the discrepancies of apartheid. What we wish, as people, is that money be made available for upgrading places like this, the hostels."

With so many pressing needs, no matter who wins this month's elections, it may be a long time before much changes.

Among those paying the price of apartheid now are its enforcers. The police protected whites and harassed, tortured and killed many blacks. As apartheid is dismantled, the police have become victims of those they oppressed.

We met Brigadier Jacques DeVries at the Johannesburg north-sector station where he commands 1,000 officers.

In 1992, DeVries said, 117 South African police officers were killed in the line of duty. The year before, the number was 66.

Police forces face change as great as any in South Africa.

"To tell you what we're like now, I'll have to tell you what we were before," DeVries said. "We were very politicized in what we had to do. We had to apply laws that made crimes of actions or things that people did that could never be a crime in any other country, like swimming in the sea, like eating in a restaurant, like dancing, like making love to a person you like, like living in a house, like working in a specific place.

"We had an allegiance to the government of the day, and that, I think, laid us open to political abuse to a certain extent.

"We're now very much aware of our accountability toward the community and that we are public servants, after all. . . . Now we say we're not loyal to the government of the day; we are loyal to the law - that's our master - and to the community."

DeVries described himself as a devout member of the Dutch Reform Church, whose doctrine supported the hard racial walls of apartheid.

"We looked at creation and we said that God created people differently for a purpose. He created animals differently, and animals don't mix. You see zebras don't mix with leopards; they may eat one another, but they don't mate. They all stick to their own sort. And we said that's why God created people differently. So blacks must remain with blacks, and whites with whites."

We saw DeVries again - and realized again how religion threads through the culture - on a warm, overcast morning when 500 new police cadets were sworn in.

I was struck by the youth and apparent innocence of the men and women, blacks and whites. They could have been teenagers graduating from high school as they patted their hair, checked their uniforms.

"The eyes of the international community will be fixed on South African police and South Africa itself," Johannesburg Mayor Les Dishy reminded them at the ceremony.

"You will face a tough task policing, with social and economic problems. That's something no one can hide," the mayor said. "This is a very exciting time in our history. Things are changing for the better. You will all play an important role in the change. We look forward to a future of peace, good will and love."

And then, perhaps because there is as much worry as hope, the 27th Psalm was read to the graduates.

"The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?"

White South Africans know what they fear. They've fortified their homes with razor wire, intricate alarm systems, iron gates and tall cement walls.

"When evildoers assail me, uttering slanders against me, my adversaries and foes, they shall stumble and fall."

The evildoers of apartheid now fear evil from others. Though the laws of apartheid have been stricken, its vestiges persist: substandard housing, unclean water in the townships and rural areas, a nation where more than 70 percent of the population can't read or write.

And fear persists.

On our last day in South Africa, sadness sets in as I eat my English breakfast of kippered herring, potatoes, toast and, of course, tea. The journey that begins tonight, via London and Washington, D.C., will take three days to reach Seattle.

I'm writing a quick letter to a friend in Michigan. As I write, two bratty white boys, curious about me, are distracting as they play with the empty chair at my table. Poor manners and bad home training, my mom would say.

Their father ignores them as they romp around the dining room. Finally, the maitre d' beckons and speaks to them quietly but firmly. They return to their dad's table. Money is thrust in their hands and they head for the exit.

"Good day," they say as they pass my table.

"Good day," I reply.

As unfair as it is for one to judge and to stereotype, I've done just that with these boys and their father. I've assumed that the only blacks they've ever seen are the servants who work at their home, servants who have only a first name, whose family or history are never discussed. Here I sit, a black woman in Western dress in a proper dining room at a five-star hotel, and on their face I read curiosity: Who is this lady? How did she get in here?

I'm sad that their innocent curiosity has been stolen from them by a system of superior and inferior, separate and never equal.

The stupidity of apartheid: Whites had blacks living and working in their homes who could speak Afrikaans, English and several native languages. Whites could converse only in Afrikaans or English. Dumb.

Saying goodbye is never easy; the country's political unrest and uncertainty make farewell that much harder. I grieve for my South African brothers and sisters - black, white, colored, Indian, Asian - who may have to sacrifice their blood before peace reigns. I look forward to returning to Seattle, yet mourn my departure.

Etched deeply in my memory, never to be erased, is this nation and its people. I know beyond all the singing, marching, chanting and protesting of my youth how wonderful it is to be of African descent. I have renewed the mantra I embraced in the 1960s, James Brown's song, "Say it loud, I'm black and I'm proud." I have a connection to the world now that I've never known before, understanding the place of my origination, my true home. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The dawn has finally begun to break. No force can now stop her or delay her emancipation from the pain and shame of our racist past as we now move toward a sharing, caring, free democratic South Africa.

I Mohammed, the only black judge in South Africa,

last November after delegates agreed on a new constitution. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "NKOSI SIKELIL' I-AFRICA"

South Africa's new national anthem, "Nkosi Sikelil' i-Afrika," was written 97 years ago by Enoch Sontonga, a teacher in a Methodist mission school.

The Xhosa hymn, sung at the first meeting of the formation of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912, has become the national anthem in four neighboring countries: Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

One of my most emotional moments in South Africa was the choral concert we attended in Soweto. Close to 3,000 people packed into the gymnasium to hear the renowned group Imilonji Kantu, which has made its mission to"sing until justice reigns in our country."

God Bless Africa

Lord, bless Africa. Let its name be praised (may her horn rise high up). Listen also to our pleas. Lord, bless Us, thy children.

Come, spirit (come, spirit, and bless us). Come, spirit. Come, spirit, holy spirit And Bless Us, Us thy children.

Lord, bless our nation And end all conflicts, O bless our nation.

(ICON) Listen: A performance of the anthem can be heard on The Seattle Times InfoLine. Call 464-2000 from any touch-tone phone and then enter category HYMN (4966). This is a free call in the local Seattle calling area, 24 hours a day.