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When the deal was finally done, exhausted negotiators jumped to their feet and burst into applause. After weeks of debate and wrangling, representatives of South Africa's political parties, black and white, agreed last week to create a 20-member, multiracial, multiparty transition council -- with blacks in the majority -- to supervise the existing government until free elections are held on April 27. For the first time, the watchdog council will give 30 million black South Africans a measure of power and legitimacy within the country's political system; its installation, perhaps as soon as the middle of October, will definitively mark the end of 45 years of white rule. "It is a historic moment," said Cyril Ramaphosa, secretary-general of the African National Congress. "This is one of the final steps in bringing down the edifice of apartheid."

By no coincidence, another important step is expected almost simultaneously. After the white-dominated Parliament approves the transitional council this week -- no difficulty is predicted -- the A.N.C. has promised it will call for the termination of international economic sanctions. South Africa's painful 30-year isolation from the world community will finally come to an end. Anticipating that moment, A.N.C. president Nelson Mandela last week made an urgent plea for foreign firms to help repair the wreckage of the long antiapartheid struggle. "We need massive investment," he told a group of South African businessmen in Cape Town. Lifting sanctions, Mandela said, would be "an important psychological step" toward renewal.

Ideologues and historians will long debate the role that sanctions played in bringing an end to the white-dominated state, but there is no doubt the ban took a heavy economic toll. Most member countries of the United Nations levied formal bans against South African investment, prohibitions that were buttressed in the U.S. by similar bans on the part of 179 localities and states. Even after George Bush proclaimed the formal end of U.S. sanctions in 1991, many of those strictures remained in place. Countless private firms also decided to wait until they received an official go-ahead from the A.N.C. Experts estimate that sanctions have cost South Africa $27 billion in trade and investment.

But will those who fought so long to close off the spigot have the same success at opening it back up? Even with Nelson Mandela's imprimatur, money is unlikely to come gurgling into South Africa soon. First investors will want to weigh the risks and prospects on the new political landscape. "Like others, we're reading the tea leaves before we decide what to do," said a spokesman for IBM, which sold its operations to a local concern known as ISM in 1987. The most intimidating hurdle that prospective investors face is the continuing level of factional violence, most of it black against black. Only a day after the pact on the transitional council was reached, another random outbreak shattered the night in Johannesburg. In two separate attacks, gunmen with automatic weapons sprayed buses loaded with homeward-bound black commuters, killing 21. The toll of factional violence has reached 1,500 deaths since 1990.