South Africa: Extremes in Black and White

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Negotiations to write a new constitution for South Africa have been under , way since December, but sometimes it seems as if the extremes -- white and black -- might first pull the country apart. The growing strength of the pro- apartheid Conservative Party has forced President F.W. de Klerk to hold a whites-only referendum on March 17 to shore up support for multiracial democracy. Meanwhile, black ultranationalists are demanding nothing less than De Klerk's surrender of power. With the old order crumbling and the shape of the new uncertain, the country is riper than ever for the destructive influence of militants. Here are encounters with two of them.

Ga Rankuwa Township, 8 a.m. Thami Mcerwa, 27, president of the Azanian Youth Organization (AZAYO) -- Azania is what his movement would rename South Africa -- is preparing for another day's work in "the struggle." He spent the night as he usually does: in a four-room matchbox house in Soweto that he shares with his mother, brother and two sisters. Then he made the 50-mile journey north in his battered green Toyota to this black ghetto outside Pretoria.

Today his task is to deliver a eulogy for a fallen comrade. Before entering the scruffy cemetery on the edge of the township, Mcerwa takes off his T shirt, emblazoned with a picture of a guerrilla fighter triumphantly holding up an AK-47 rifle, and pulls on a dashiki, a loose-fitting African tunic. "Power!" he shouts to the 100 assembled mourners. "One Azania! One nation!" As a hot morning sun beats down, he angrily accuses a white-owned chemical company of murdering his comrade by exposing him to dangerous toxins on the job. "They think black life is so cheap!" he yells.

Pretoria, 4 p.m. Piet Rudolph, 54, a grim, potbellied former policeman wearing a khaki uniform with swastika-like emblems, slips into an empty basement restaurant. Run by a trusted friend, it is one of the places where he can hide if the police are looking for him. He prefers to stay in the shadows with the lights off as he settles into a corner table.

Although Rudolph is the press officer for the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement, known as the A.W.B., his job mainly involves covert preparations for what he sees as the coming war to defend the white "fatherland" against blacks. Rudolph, in fact, is regarded as the country's most dangerous white terrorist. Though many continue to scoff at the A.W.B. as a comic-opera fringe group, that will change, Rudolph warns, when chaos descends upon South Africa.

Mcerwa's hero is Steve Biko, the black nationalist leader whose 1977 death in police custody turned him into the country's most celebrated black martyr. At 12 Mcerwa joined the 1976 Soweto uprising, the landmark outbreak of racial violence in which more than 100 blacks were killed. As he ran home after being teargassed, an older student who had been his political mentor was gunned down by the police.

Haunted by such bitter memories, Mcerwa rejects the conciliatory approach of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. "We want total liberation, not cosmetic changes," he explains. "It may take some bloodshed. We may go into a civil-war struggle. But quick-fix solutions won't work. As Steve Biko said, 'It is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die.' "