NELSON MANDELA & F.W. DE KLERK

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not have foreseen only a few years earlier. ''Our goal is a new South Africa,'' De Klerk told the audience at the Nobel awards ceremony. From the same platform, Mandela proclaimed, ''We can today even set the dates when all humanity will join together to celebrate one of the outstanding victories of our century.'' That victory was not easily won, and the mutual enmity between Mandela and De Klerk may be due in part to battle fatigue. There is another reason. Both men knew that their collaboration would, if successful, lead to political rivalry between them. De Klerk the incumbent and Mandela the challenger are now active candidates for the presidency of South Africa. Thanks to their work, the election scheduled for April 27 will embrace all the nation's citizens, including the previously disenfranchised blacks who, numbering 28 million, make up 75% of the population. Given the stunning majority of potential black voters, Mandela is regarded as a shoo-in. Not by De Klerk, who seems determined to prove that he has not negotiated himself out of his job. But it is not just casting eyes at the same prize that has made Mandela and De Klerk so uncomfortable together, so prone to display visceral anger toward each other's words and deeds. (They are not, after two dozen meetings, even on a first-name basis; it is ''Mr. Mandela'' and ''Mr. President.'') The task they have been forced by circumstances to undertake in concert has tested their characters in fiendishly exasperating ways. Both De Klerk and Mandela are attorneys, skilled in the art of compromise. Both also have stubborn streaks and strong, entrenched opinions, shaped in large measure by their very different South African pasts. For De Klerk, a fourth-generation Afrikaner and hence a beneficiary of white privilege under the old system, change has meant revoking the legacy of his forebears. He vehemently denies, however, that he has done so, and he claims that his father, who died in 1979 after serving in three apartheid-enforcing governments, ''would agree with me today.'' Still, De Klerk was not a born reformer. During his rise through the ranks of the National Party, he allied himself with its verkrampte, or ''closed- minded conservative,'' camp. He was a pragmatic politician, eager to press the flesh and do the deal. He proved cautious in his personal life as well. He married and stayed married to his college sweetheart. An earlier generation of South African leaders liked to relax by hunting big game; De Klerk took up golf. One thing that rankled Mandela's supporters throughout the talks was De Klerk's dogged refusal to condemn the principle of apartheid. The President will admit that the system led to injustices, particularly the forced removals of blacks from places legally declared off limits to them. ''That is where it became wrong, where it became morally unjustifiable, where it became an impairment on the dignity of people.'' Even so, De Klerk speaks wistfully about ''grand apartheid'' as a system that might have worked in South Africa had all the nation's diverse ethnic and tribal groups accepted geographic separation voluntarily. Mandela, a child of the oppressed majority, finds this notion hateful. It has been the labor of his life to overthrow apartheid, not because it didn't do its job but because it was morally repellent. Part of Mandela's irritation with De Klerk seems to stem from this fundamental disagreement over why change was necessary. True, Mandela largely