Rumbles on the Right

It was the kind of banter that only the most verkrampte, or hard-line, Afrikaner would find amusing. But when Andries Treurnicht and Jaap Marais, the leaders of two of South Africa's right-wing political parties, shared a platform in Pretoria earlier this year to protest the government's repeal of laws banning interracial sex and marriage, their racist exchanges produced waves of laughter from the conservative audience.

Marais: Consider the circumstances if your black in-laws were to visit you at your home.

Treurnicht: Ma-in-law could work in the kitchen while Pa-in-law could help out in the garden.

To State President P.W. Botha's ruling National Party, the Treurnicht-Marais challenge is no laughing matter, as last week's cautious performance at Durban proved. While Botha has pressed his agenda of modest reform, he has been forced to watch the right wing carefully. A senior National Party official estimated this month that of South Africa's 4.9 million whites (60% of whom are Afrikaners), about 20% support ultraconservative groups that insist on retaining total apartheid. If the President continues on his path of reform, the official predicted, the extreme right might increase its strength by 6% to 8%. Other analysts go further: they suggest the hardline camp could include as much as 40% of the white electorate, with support coming not only from Afrikaners but from some English-speaking whites as well.

In the forefront of the right-wing thrust stands the Conservative Party, headed by Treurnicht, 64, a former National Party member and Cabinet minister who broke with Botha in 1982 over the issue of limited power sharing with nonwhites. When the President acted on his proposal for a tricameral Parliament, Treurnicht bolted the National Party, along with 16 other M.P.s, and formed his own party. Treurnicht, who is derided as "Dr. No" by his foes, aims his no-compromise rhetoric mainly at lower-class whites.

The increasingly popular Conservative Party has eclipsed the Herstigte (Reformed) National Party. Established in 1969, it is unabashedly racist and exclusively Afrikaner. H.N.P. Leader Marais, 62, says South Africa's unrest could be quelled if the police would only round up "layabouts" in black townships and send them off to labor colonies. "If you're proud of being a white man and you recognize the divinely ordained differentiation between the races," he says, "you're accused of being a racist." The H.N.P, which received 14.1% of the vote in the 1981 national elections, is not represented in Parliament. Even further right is a small (estimated supporters: 5,000) faction that calls itself the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Resistance Movement). Members of the group have been convicted of terrorism for planning to blow up multiracial hotels and "eliminate" black antiapartheid activists.

While the National Party is not likely to lose its comfortable parliamentary majority any time soon, the right wing severely circumscribes Botha's freedom of movement toward change. Addressing himself to the President, Treurnicht last week told a provincial congress of the Conservative Party, "With all respect, I warn you. You will be crushed between black-radical demands and the resistance of whites. You are awakening the tiger in the whites."