South Africa Still Crying Freedom

By DONALD WOODS

More than 700 people have died in the townships around Johannesburg since fighting broke out in mid-August, largely between supporters of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress and Zulus belonging to Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi's Inkatha movement. Last week the bloodshed reached a numbing climax, when black men rampaged through a Soweto-bound commuter train with guns, pangas and knives, killing at least 26 people. The violence poses a threat to the fundamental change promised by President F.W. de Klerk, whose efforts to dismantle apartheid nonetheless achieve an important milestone next week when he meets with President Bush. Not since Jan Smuts visited the U.S. in 1945 -- three years before De Klerk's National Party wrote racism into the statute books -- has Washington deemed it appropriate to receive a South African head of state.

Donald Woods, the white newspaper editor whose writings about his friendship with black activist Steve Biko became the subject of the film Cry Freedom, returned to South Africa last month from exile in Britain -- his first visit since fleeing the country after Biko's death in police custody in 1977. TIME asked Woods to write about his personal encounter with the changing country.

I parked my car outside Security Police headquarters, remembering past interrogations and harassments. Think Gershwin, I said to myself, as I had in those days 12 years ago, when mentally humming a piece of music helped ease the fear. During the last scary session with Colonel Andries van der Merwe in 1977, I had countered his aggression with the finale of Gershwin's Concerto in F. And now I had made an appointment with his successors to judge the extent of change among the dread Security Police in the new South Africa. Though I was no longer too scared to go in there, I was sufficiently apprehensive to resort mentally to Fascinating Rhythm as I pressed the button beside the familiar steel grille.

That I was no longer scared to go in there was itself a measure of the atmospheric change I had experienced after two weeks back in South Africa. On first impression, it looked a very different country indeed: blacks being allowed into hotels, bars, theaters and schools previously denied them by law, no more segregated beaches, toilets, parks or benches. This very week the governing National Party had voted to open its membership to blacks, an organizational turnaround analogous to a P.L.O. recruitment drive among Jews. If not entirely dead, apartheid was clearly in the intensive care unit with the oxygen turned off.

The steel grille clanked open with awful familiarity, and moments later, Colonel Nel, a dark-haired young man, smiling amiably, held out his hand. He looked too young to be a colonel, and I remembered the saying that we are getting old when policemen and doctors start looking like teenagers.

I was given a comfortable chair and a fresh cup of tea, and wondered if this was how a returning Soviet dissident would feel on revisiting Lubyanka prison. As I talked with Colonel Nel, it seemed to me that the biggest change in Security Police thinking was the death of the old obsession that international communism was all powerful and that opponents of apartheid were putative communists if not actual paid agents of the Kremlin. The young colonel agreed. The whole approach was more sophisticated these days, he said, and the country faced a different set of perceived challenges embodied by the alienated black youth in the townships.

It seemed a massive irony. Through four decades of apartheid, the Afrikaner Nationalists had outlawed effective political structures in the townships and devastated black family life, creating in the process a generation of scary kids ready to burn, maim and hack to pieces real or fancied enemies -- kids who had never known a home with parents, never been to school or followed any rule but the rule of survival by violence. Now to save the whites from this Frankenstein monster of their creation, the government was counting on the recently legalized African National Congress (A.N.C.) and leaders like Nelson Mandela to bring these wild ones into some sort of discipline.

On my first morning back in the country, I drove into one of the worst townships in terms of squalor, poverty and juvenile rage, and was alarmed on being surrounded by several dozen tough-looking young blacks who demanded to know who the white man was and what he was doing there. My instant fear turned to instant relief when on hearing my identity they literally opened their arms to "our brother." Astonishingly, all had seen Cry Freedom, and their questions had less to do with the national situation than with what the stars of the movie, Kevin Kline and Denzel Washington, were like and how the crowd scenes had been filmed.

It was the first of many moving welcomes from a wide range of South Africans, including a number of conservative whites who had resented my editorials back in the '70s. This didn't mean their views had changed radically, but what was significant was the number of whites who, while still against one person, one vote, now accepted that as inevitable. This indeed was a sea change.

In the South Africa I had left in 1977 only a small percentage of whites -- probably less than 2% -- supported the notion of full democratic rights for blacks, and most whites were vociferously ready to fight to the death against the very idea. But now a great many seemed resigned to the idea, provided a democratic constitution could guarantee protection for minorities -- whites, in the new code language.

Up to the late '70s, liberal white advocates of equal rights for blacks had been overwhelmingly English speaking, led by the likes of Alan Paton, Helen Suzman and Nadine Gordimer. Today younger Afrikaners are taking the lead among whites in the campaign for democracy and racial reconciliation, notably Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, a brilliant academic and former rugby star; Max du Preez, editor of the crusading paper Vrye Weekblad; and Tian van der Merwe, campaigning to close the gap between white parliamentarians and the A.N.C.

Most remarkable of all is the case of the President himself, F.W. de Klerk, who on the morning of my visit to the Security Police was shown on national television greeting blacks in Soweto with the black-solidarity handshake -- palm enclosing palm, thumb and then palm again -- and being applauded by black bystanders of all ages.

In the end, perhaps the biggest change for me was the absence of the sense of being followed, monitored and under constant threat by the Security Police, and its absence after only two weeks back in the country was so perceptible that here I was doing the unthinkable -- actually walking voluntarily into their offices.

I asked after all my old enemies. Colonel Goosen? Dead. Colonel Van der Merwe? Retired. Captain Hansen? Transferred. Captain Schoeman? Somewhere up- country. I already knew that Lieut. Jan Marais, who had once mailed an acid-tainted T shirt to my five-year-old daughter Mary, had been found drowned in his own swimming pool in 1988.

I asked if I could have my old file as a souvenir, and Colonel Nel burst out laughing: "We don't even have it anymore!" Irrationally, I felt slightly peeved at being regarded as harmless so soon, but on balance was more than happy about it. As he walked me out to my car, he said, "Please drop in anytime. You're most welcome. Good luck!"

Good luck to us all, I thought, in light of the escalating violence in the country. If we can bury the past, rectify decades of oppression, reclaim the lost generation, overcome the dangerous death throes of right-wing and left- wing extremism and create a real democracy in this country, there would be a great future for South Africa. A colossal task, with colossal challenges. But a start had been made by brave men, and I hoped and believed they would gain the support they deserved.