Time to Take Charge

White-haired, bearded Cronje Tshaka is older than the 82-year-old African National Congress. Now he has outlived apartheid. Clutching his identity book in one hand and his cane in the other, Tshaka, 95, waited patiently in line to vote last week -- like all South Africa's black citizens, for the first time in his life. He shook off offers of help, walking unsteadily but unaided into the polling station in Guguletu, one of the toughest and grimiest of the black townships around Cape Town. Minutes later he emerged, a broad grin lighting his face. "I never thought I would see this day," he said.

Those very words echoed in millions of minds across South Africa last week. In a series of astonishing episodes, beginning with all-race voting from the Limpopo to the Cape of Good Hope, the old South Africa of segregation and oppression dissolved itself and re-emerged as a tentatively hopeful, newly democratic nation. On Wednesday morning at 12:01, the old order formally ended as cheering crowds in the nine new provincial capitals hailed the lowering of apartheid's blue-white-and-orange flag and the raising of a banner with six colors symbolizing the people, their blood, their land, the gold under the ground, the sky -- and white for peace.

At the same moment, the country became whole again. The 10 black homelands, including four that had pretended to independence, designed by apartheid architects as places of exile for surplus people with black skin, were abolished. The armed services became the South African National Defense Force, and will begin to absorb former enemies from guerrilla armies like the A.N.C.'s Spear of the Nation. Things were changing so fast, a South African Broadcasting Corp. interviewer lost track of who was President, Nelson Mandela, who will be sworn in next week, or F.W. de Klerk, the incumbent. He turned from talking with De Klerk to sign off, saying, "Well, there's State . . . former State Pres . . . well, State President de Klerk, Mr. de Klerk . . . not former yet."

Perhaps predictably, a group of bloody-minded white rightists had tried -- and failed -- to disrupt the process of change. They had launched a campaign of small bombings against railways, power lines and A.N.C. offices in the conservative farm region west of Johannesburg. Then last week they detonated powerful car bombs in downtown Johannesburg, in neighboring Germiston and at the international airport, killing a total of 21 people and injuring more than 150. By the end of the week the police had rounded up 34 suspects, all members of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner Resistance Movement.